It's 1977. A scrappy kid named Steve Jobs is hunched over a cluttered workbench in his parents' garage. The air smells of solder and burnt circuits. Outside, the world’s tech giants are busy building skyscrapers, their executives tucked away in leather chairs, puffing on cigars, laughing at the idea that a computer could ever belong in a home.
IBM, the Goliath of the tech world, is churning out mainframes the size of refrigerators, selling them to businesses that treat them like sacred relics. They call the shots, and their vision of the future is more of the same: bigger, faster, but never different. Disruption? That’s for amateurs, and Steve Jobs—barefoot, turtlenecked, and bursting with a vision no one else could see—is the amateur they scoff at most.
But while IBM is busy fortifying its walls, Jobs is busy dismantling them. He’s not interested in their towering mainframes. He’s building something smaller, something personal, something that fits on a desk and changes the world. He doesn’t just want to sell a product; he wants to start a revolution.
The Innovator’s Dilemma isn’t just a business theory. It’s a mirror. Do you cling to the comfortable, to the thing that worked last year, or do you torch the whole thing and start anew? The dilemma is a whisper in the back of your mind, that says, "What if?" And then, with a smirk, "What if you fail?"