"And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a community that will become a prototype for the future."
The context of this statement by Walt Disney was concerning his ideas for EPCOT and the city of tommorrow.
I bring it up to mention the importance of knowing the difference between times we need to destroy something completely and build from scratch, and when we need to simply tweak something to make it better.
It's always easy for business writers to talk about Joseph Schumpeter and his idea of "Creative Destruction." It's also easy to perform creative destruction rather than build something. We should all have learned from the failure to the dotcom hype that asserting creative destruction is different than truly executing it.
What Walt Disney was so great at was identifying the root of the problem, and then being able to take steps to rectify and meet the needs.
In the case of the city of tommorrow, it wasn't what he eventually came up with that was important, but rather that he understood the need to build from the ground up and start over, rather than simply make a few adjustments to the old cities.
To be great at leading a business, one of the key points of wisdom is to know when we need to tweak something or completely destroy it. The failure of the dotcom companies teach us that using a slogan of "creative destruction" isn't always the answer, and the product or service offered may not have to be destroyed, but improved.
How we do that is by correctly identifying the problem being solved by our product or service, and then knowing if it is to be disruptive or making something incrementally improved. Both have their place, and knowing the difference will be what determines our success as business leaders.
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