How Will You Measure Your Life?

A deliberate strategy is a company’s initial strategy when tackling a specific market. For example, when Honda entered the US motorcycle market, the company wanted to directly compete with Harley Davidson and marketed large bikes. This deliberate strategy struggled because of unanticipated problems, including the high cost of bike maintenance. Honda then shifted gears and marketed their smaller bikes, built for confined, urban spaces—an emergent strategy. Clayton M. Christensen asserts that “strategy is not a discrete analytical event—something decided, say, in a meeting of top managers based on the best numbers and analysis available at the time. Rather, it is a continuous, diverse, and unruly process” (46). In order to succeed, companies must be able to adapt their deliberate strategies and be flexible to change.

Using the rise of Asus computers at the expense of Dell computers as an example, Christensen describes disruptive innovation as the following:

[It] happens when a competitor enters a market with a low-priced product or service that most established industry players view as inferior. But the new competitor uses technology and its business model to continually improve its offering until it is good enough to satisfy what customers need (10-11).