# Innovator's Dilemma/Harvard Prof Clayton Christensen - slammed in The New Yorker

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/innovators-dilemma-harvard-prof-clayton-christensen-slammed-in-the-new-yorker/691067>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [June 18, 2014, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/innovators-dilemma-harvard-prof-clayton-christensen-slammed-in-the-new-yorker/691067 "2014-06-18T15:41:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\
**Post date:** [June 18, 2014, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/innovators-dilemma-harvard-prof-clayton-christensen-slammed-in-the-new-yorker/691067/1 "2014-06-18T15:41:31Z")

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Just needed to get this out there - totally swamped and about to get on a phone call for work.

Was reading this week’s New Yorker - journalist/staff writer Jill Lepore has an article about the business concept of “disruption” - how successful companies can’t innovate with new technologies because they are so entrenched in the huge businesses they built on their own previous tech innovations.

Disruption is a huge business right now - accepted as fact, consulting companies built around the concept etc. It is generally traced to starting with Harvard Prof Clayton Christensen, whose book The Innovator’s Dilemma frames the concept and illustrates it with a number of examples, most famously the disc drive industry in the last quarter of last century.

Lepore basically tosses off the concept of Disruption, as well as Christensen’s methods and perhaps even Christensen himself, as so much crap.

Here is a link to [Salon.com](http://Salon.com)’s write up of this kerfuffle, which I have not read yet:  
[http://www.salon.com/2014/06/16/the\_emperor\_of\_disruption\_theory\_is\_wearing\_no\_clothes/](http://www.salon.com/2014/06/16/the_emperor_of_disruption_theory_is_wearing_no_clothes/)

Fascinating stuff.

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**Author:** ![TroutMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troutman/32/6721_2.png) [@TroutMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TroutMan)\
**Post date:** [June 18, 2014, 4:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/innovators-dilemma-harvard-prof-clayton-christensen-slammed-in-the-new-yorker/691067/2 "2014-06-18T16:24:50Z")

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I’m kind of mixed on it. Disruption is certainly a buzz word that has lost a lot of whatever meaning it once had. I like Lepore’s point about how defining “disruptive” uses circular logic: “If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt.”

But I think she went overboard with some of it too. Salon might not think so, but to me it did come across as fairly anti-technology when she starts complaining about coffee-drinking startup types and challenges to traditional journalism. Check out the [Slate article](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/06/clayton_christensen_and_disruptive_innovation_is_the_concept_a_myth.html) about it, which points out some places Lepore overreached a bit. Slate also called out something that struck me as a bit ridiculous in the original article:

> [@](#):
>
> Faith in disruption is the best illustration, and the worst case, of a larger historical transformation having to do with secularization, and what happens when the invisible hand replaces the hand of God as explanation and justification.

Huh?