10/17/06 Michael Raynor
The Innovator's Solution: Creating and sustaining successful growth

When Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma appeared a few years back, it unsettled executives as no other recent book has, for two reasons. First, it demonstrated how often companies do everything right and still get roughed up by competitors who attack them with disruptive technologies. Christensen was hailed as an analytical genius, but that led to the second unsettling factor: the book's vivid description of the problem was not matched by much in the way of advice for combating the threat that he so convincingly detailed.

So successful was the book and so immense was Christensen's reputation that that he could have recruited virtually anyone to help him write the follow-up book everyone wanted - the one that described solutions. The person he turned to was Michael Raynor. Together they created The Innovator's Solution, which itself has become a huge best-seller. Fast Company calls it "a valuable tool for every aspiring upstart - whether you're inside a billion-dollar company or have a billion-dollar glimmer in your eye," because it "zeroes in on the critical hinges of growth: what products you should develop, which customers you should focus on, and what kind of organization and processes you need to shape average business ideas into disruptive strategies that create new markets." Business Week has named it the best business book of the year.

Michael Raynor's a deep thinker, holding a degree in philosophy in addition to his Doctorate in Business Administration from Harvard. Yet his day-to-day responsibilities are intensely pragmatic: as a director in Deloitte Research, the thought leadership arm of Deloitte, a global professional services firm with over 100,000 employees, he is a key figure in the firm's Strategy & Operations practice. He works with the senior executives of dozens of clients around the world addressing their most demanding strategic issues. In addition, he has written scores of articles for publications that include Harvard Business Review, Optimize, Long Range Planning, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Journal of Business Strategy, and Engineering Economist. One of his HBR articles, "Skate to Where the Money Will Be," won the McKinsey Award for excellence.

Former Medtronic chairman and CEO Bill George says The Innovator's Solution provides "practical, realistic solutions to the dilemmas of innovation," and Intel's Andrew Grove and Nokia's president Pekka Ala-Pietilä have joined in the chorus of praise. If Michael Raynor can help those companies get from where they are to where they want to be, chances are he can do the same for you.

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