---
title: "You're Not Ready to Compete with Self Disruptive Companies"
date: 2026-08-13T11:35
author: Julien Reszka
description: "Companies almost never get blindsided by disruption. Their own incentives stop them acting on threats they already see coming."
keywords: ["strategy", "decision-making", "business", "technology"]
canonical: https://julienreszka.com/blog/you-re-not-ready-to-compete-with-self-disruptive-companies/
---

# You're Not Ready to Compete with Self Disruptive Companies

Companies almost never get blindsided by disruption. Their own incentives stop them acting on threats they already see coming.

Most executives think they are competing on strategy, price, or execution. The real dividing line is narrower than that: whether a company is willing to kill its own best product before a competitor does it for them. Almost none of them choose to.

Clayton Christensen spent a decade studying why great companies fail and found the ones that got disrupted were rarely blind to the threat. [The process that decides where money and engineers go](https://julienreszka.com/blog/you-can-t-plan-demand-you-can-plan-supply/), the same process that made them successful, systematically starved any project that threatened their most profitable product. Good management was the cause, not bad management.

Andy Grove ran Intel while it was a memory chip company losing badly to Japanese competitors. In 1985, he asked Intel cofounder Gordon Moore what a new CEO would do in their position. Moore said he would get the company out of memory chips entirely. Grove did it himself instead: he shut plants, cut a third of the workforce, and moved everything into microprocessors, the product Intel is known for today. Revenue grew from about 1.6 billion dollars in 1984 to nearly 9 billion by 1993.

The same pattern holds outside Intel.

- In 2007, Netflix started replacing its own profitable DVD by mail business with streaming, years before anything forced it to. Its market value has grown more than 100 times since.
- In 2000, Blockbuster was offered the chance to buy Netflix outright for 50 million dollars and turned it down. It filed for bankruptcy in 2010, owing more than 900 million dollars.
- Amazon Web Services now produces close to three fifths of Amazon's operating profit, while the retail business it grew inside of runs on margins near 2 percent.

Self disruption keeps winning and companies keep failing to attempt it anyway, for the same reason each time. It requires someone with enough authority to override the process currently making the company money, and that usually only happens after a crisis forces the question, the way it did for Grove. Waiting for a crisis is not a strategy.

What is starting to change is who has to notice the threat. Maximilian Mews [wrote about proactive AI systems](https://maximilianmews.com/proactive-ai/?ref=you-re-not-ready-to-compete-with-self-disruptive-companies) built to scan a company's own tools and communications for the changes worth making, without waiting for an employee to notice or a crisis to force the issue. That removes the exact bottleneck that has made self disruption a once a decade event instead of a standing capability. A company running on it does not need its own Grove moment. It has the process running by default.

---

**Actionable insight:** Ask whether your own company would kill its own best-selling product to build the thing that replaces it. If the honest answer is no, that willingness gap is what a self disruptive competitor will exploit, not a weaker product or a smaller budget.

## Key figure

**5.6x** — How much Intel's revenue grew between 1984 and 1993, after Andy Grove killed the company's founding memory chip business to bet everything on microprocessors

*Source: Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive, Doubleday, 1996; Intel annual revenue, 1984 to 1993*

## Myth vs reality

**Myth:** Getting disrupted is bad luck, a shift in the market nobody could have seen coming.

**Reality:** Kodak's own engineer built a working digital camera in 1975 and the company patented it. Blockbuster was offered the chance to buy Netflix outright for 50 million dollars in 2000. Both saw it coming and chose not to act.

*Source: Steven Sasson digital camera patent record, 1975 to 1978; Marc Randolph's account of the 2000 Blockbuster and Netflix meeting*

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