Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of 'Disruptive Innovation' | Hacker News Reader

Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of 'Disruptive Innovation'

businessweek.com

The thought that comes to mind after reading this is "protest to much" and also in a very aggressive and condescending way. Not something I would have expected in tone from an accomplished academic.

Plus the repeated use of the first name like this: "Come on, Jill, tell me! No!" is clearly unnecessary and parental in tone. Especially considering not only do they not know each other but he has never even met her (last part of article).

I think Christensen has been living in his ivory tower to long and getting to much esteemed attention and he simply was completely knocked off balance by someone (of I'm guessing near, or equal, stature) taking issue with what he has said. I'm sure there are many people who have taken shots at his books or theories but not a fellow colleague at Harvard.

He also talks about himself in the third person. "So that money was put in the market by somebody who is not Clayton Christensen. So what does that tell you about the theory of disruption, or about Clayton Christensen?" I've always viewed that as a sign of bluster.

Good stuff. I understand Christensen's complaints.

Jill Lepore (the author of the "takedown") puts off a weird vibe in her writeup, as if she's personally frustrated, as opposed to just saying "hey here are some issues"

I agree that there's a bit of a cult around "disruption". As with lots of good ideas: Agile, Lean, disruption, there's a core truth, and then there are the people who take it too far -- the zealots.

Seems like she must be surrounded by the zealots, hence the frustration.

Basically she is responding to a straw man - 'disruption' as represented by people who are using it to bless their own plans with an aura of power and inevitability, rather than people who are carefully analyzing a business context.

Something about Christensen and his authoritative response seems most at home in the former group.

Have you read anything he has written about the actual theory?

Like most people I read the first book years ago. Nothing in that contradicts the impression that his current argument is a chauvinistic appeal to authority.

Harry Lewis is that rare academic who is usually honest:

http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2014/06/clayton-christensen-...

Implying that academics are typically dishonest? Your link provides some solid points, but your comment is doesn't make much sense.

Economy is a fuzzy topic. You can't quite model it right, you can't experiment by eliminating all the variables but the ones you test and so on.

It's not an exact science.

So people who thrive in such fields are people who can slap a convincing narrative to a set of selected events, and call it a theory.

Now, Christensen's narrative about Disruptive Innovation has many true elements to it. It's a useful tool in the box to have, as a model, when you analyze your business, your competition and the market you're in.

But it becomes counterproductive when Christensen seemingly is ready to explain everything as the after-effect of disruption. Take his excuse about the iPhone not failing. He's saying "no, I was right, but I failed to spot that the iPhone is disrupting laptops and not phones."

So he got it right, except he got it wrong. Plus, it's hardly that simple. The iPhone is not disrupting just laptops, it's obviously disrupting phones, and desktops, and even wristwatches. He, better than anyone, should know that the thing being disrupted is not a product, but a way of doing a given task, something he calls "what we hire to get the job done".

And so... what good is a model, what good is a theory, if it's so malleable, and so subjective, that you can explains all possible outcomes for a company by tweaking what you see as the disruptor and the disrupted? What value is a model that can't make a proper prediction?

The father of Disruptive Innovation has failed to be any more accurate than a coin toss so far. We're by now convinced Christensen can fit any happenstance to his narrative after the fact, but just as Lepore has noticed, he has yet to make a prediction that turns out as he expected.

He's just guessing, like all of us. But he has authority, because his book is enjoying popularity, so he has that air of authority when he speaks.

I respect Christensen, but unfortunately he's fallible like all of us. He wants his theory to matter, he wants his theory to be shown "right" in every single case, but his theory of disruptive innovation is but a small element in a very big picture. He himself acknowledges that in his response, but fails to grasp the implications of it in the economic outcomes for the players he's analyzing.

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