Ben Thompson: preference

Transcript context

…Yes. I want to know about something or I’m writing about something, and I read very fast, so I will plow through a book in a morning to get context about something and then use it to write. The books I find particularly useful for what I do is the founding stories of companies and going back to decisions made very early because going back — we talked at the beginning of the podcast about when companies do stupid things — it’s often embedded in their culture about why they do that, and understanding that is useful. But if you want one thing to read about business strategy, I do go back to Clay Christensen’s the original The Innovator’s Dilemma. The reason I like that book and go back to it, even though I think he’s taken the concept a little too far, and one of the first articles I got traction on was saying why he got Apple so wrong, but what I like about that book specifically is the fundamental premise is managers can do the “right thing” and fail. That gets into what I talked about before — why do companies do stuff that in retrospect was really dumb? Often it’s done for very good, legitimate reasons. That’s what they’re incentivized to do — they’re serving their best customer. They were adding on features because people wanted them, and that actually made them susceptible to disruption. I think that’s very generalized, broadly it’s a very useful concept. Now you’ve worked at Apple, Microsoft, WordPress. What did you learn at WordPress?…

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