https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine
Was going to send yesterday – but my AI bot cautioned about waiting a decent interval...
PS
The real innovation occurs in any industry, Kara, when capital-intensive production and human-intensive design disaggregate, and both are free to advance separably...
PPS
In each of the disc-drive and jet-engine industries, they actually got a sub-exponential version of Moore's law to work...
In one, diameters were reduced, till it no longer made economic sense...
In the other, the diameters were increased...
Even in the chip industry – what’s the next number in the following series…
76, 100, 125, 150, 200, 300…
Answer: 300
Partial credit for 450…
The common thread – new materials and new tooling for the next generation...
The biggest barrier to eventual commoditization is continual innovation...
And purposeful re-aggregation – about which you could ask Steve, but he’s left the factory…
This man was a fraud and a huckster. The fact that many sheep flocked to him doesn't make him anything else. Good riddance!
5
Decide what you stand.And then stand for it all the time. Never admit your wrong.Never apologize.It also will get you elected President
Move fast and break up Facebook.
1
Is it fair to blame Mr. Christensen for Uber, or its ilk?
"disruptive innovation" such a hackneyed phrase. Kind like "curated" and "the cloud".
All describe things that have been around long before the new terms became fashionable. Most the time this happens because someone is trying to convey a common concept but make others think it's a truly unique, never before seen/known concept.
2
"Move fast and break things" always sounded to me liked a
very spoiled and temperamental child.
It never evoked anything positive.
2
I had not heard of Professor Christensen until now. His legacy may not be completely written as this article implies. The question is, what to do now? Is his prophecy to be fulfilled where technology is transformative, but also destructive? Well, I think both good and bad arise from any technology.
Humanity tends to oscillate in our behaviors arising from new technology is not excluded. The good techies preach that their tech will not be useful for evil, until it is. The evil techies exploit. Then the oscillation back to correct the badness.
An example is somewhat fanciful and horrific. Suppose autonomous vehicles become more common. Also, suppose facial recognition becomes available to the general public. How soon would you imagine a Tesla, or another Autonomous Vehicle, be instructed to find and kill or injure someone based on facial recognition?
I own Tesla cars and stock and Elon Musk has stated publicly that he is very wary of Artificial Intelligence gone awry. His cars might be subverted, as any technology may. Always beware unintended consequences.
We need more people thinking on this.
Let's get ahead of that curve and try to put some boundaries on companies such as Facebook who look to maximize profit with no sense of community.
Here is an interview with Elon Musk on YouTube on AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H15uuDMqDK0
Our country and earth are in the doldrums of people that only want to make money {a lot} and not care for the people or what they do to the earth.
It's time to realize that money is not everything. Human beings are what made you and all you want is money.
When is it enough. When is it not enough.
The greed in the world has brought us to the destruction of it. That's not enough.
You won't be able to spend your money if there is no earth left because of you greedy people.
Do something with your money to address the issue of the earth as well as human beings.
It starts now or we lose all.....
1
Andy Grove was not a founder of Intel. He was employee number three.
1
Here’s what I think may be innovative to offer. Some jives with what Kara says, some not so much.
“Moving fast” leaves little time to think. Sometimes thinking can be a good thing. Maybe not so much in the boxing metaphor below, but maybe when trying to get right a popular consultant’s message, especially as the latter gains perspective. And when considering how your metaphors can backfire.
“Social responsibility” needs to be an essential part of the business. The implicit line between the company box, larger society, and world never existed. Our society and world are deeply troubled. Business must be part of the solution, and not just high tech. Capitalism must evolve so that “Purpose” is always there.
We shouldn’t “measure everything.” That is part of the problem. Instead, measurement is just a tool. (Did a 21-part series on that. Here’s Part 1, https://www.greenbiz.com/news/2012/11/07sustainability-metrics-school-reform.)
Remember what Mike Tyson said about planning: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
On the other hand, “Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time” is fine the way it is.
Innovation has to be paired with sensitivity to innovation-blockers, including the ones you’re not yet prepared to see.
Relatedly, practice looking at a lot of things differently, including your assumptions and mindsets.
OK, now go innovate some solutions to our hellish problems! Disrupt where it’s socially responsible to. Re-craft elsewhere.
The brand of technology immediately we think of Facebook. Facebook a corrupt CEO who lied about our democracy and accepted money from the Russians. Creating private rooms where the white supremacy and sexual predators meet. Everyone can scream hate from the rooftops and he allows political smears to be on his platform. Private dinners with Trump testifies to the Senate with a smug face as if he is smarter than anyone else. Google, the executives have forced sex with employees and then get huge pay outs. Google gives $5 dollars to the homeless to take their pictures to work on minority facial recognition.
We have technology tracking our every move, facial recognition given to the government to build a database. Tech companies have sold software to China to get their business.
Talk to your blue in the face, Silicon Valley doesn't create anything that doesn't have a payday for themselves not for anyone else. they haven't done a thing in SF to help the veterans who fought for this country war after war. Why should they? they are elites.
There is no redeeming technology companies, because this is the next generations of America, a country of spies, liars, and elites. No room for thinking Americans
The GOP has a president with the support of Facebook enabling him to continue with the corruption that is the GOP and technology.
So it doesn't matter how technology brands themselves. we know the truth about how they make their money and how they exploit people.
Just because someone invents something, doesn't mean I have to make it part of my life.
Allen Berrien
4
It is ironic. When Silicon valley, the first generation, came about (HP, Intel, Fairchild, etc), there was an ethos there, they were known for groundbreaking engineering but they also had a sense of what their technology could bring to the world (HP is a shell of itself, at one point it produced some of the best and innovating products around). Silicon Valley II, bred in the shadows of those firms, took that technology and invented new paradigms (the personal computer, for example, the video game industry, number of other things). There was an idealism there, one where they saw what they were producing would change the world, give people information at their fingertips, bring the power of computing home, etc......obviously, they changed over time, Jobs once believed as the others did, until his idealism went out the window with his desire to control things, to be the ultimate power in tech, others as they became corporations lost most of that. Silicon valley III, based in the internet and phone apps, never even pretended to be there for the common good, it was about stock price and gaining control.
6
Thanks for writing this. I did not know about Christensen's philosophy or his books, but we're all well-acquainted with the approach. I'm surprised you didn't mention the enormous disruption of online shopping which has destroyed many small retail businesses, turned many main street shopping districts into ghost towns, and shuttered shopping malls all over the country. Whether this is disruptive or destructive depends on your point of view.
7
24/7/52
2
An excellent piece. Thank you.
1
"Disruption." "Move fast and break things."
Have these strategies truly been good for the world?
I look around and I don't think so.
4
Kara,
Your interpretation of “Move Fast and Break Things.” is out of context and unfair. That is a message to their software engineers that they have the company's permission to try new and big things without fear of repercussion if they were to accidentally introduce bugs into existing code.
2
@Jason
Not really, the problem is as a corporate ethos that translated into 'do what you will, as long as it grows the business and the stock price". Software engineers don't decide business strategy, they might come up with better ways to do things or have suggestions, but the corporate ethos comes from those running the company. Zuckerberg and Sandberg basically gave themselves carte blanche to do anything at all they wanted, and that is the problem. Michael Critchton, talking about genetic engineering, said something like "They found out they could do something, but never asked themselves if they should be doing it". Facebook allowed datamining being used by political operatives, they sold customer information and data without theier consent and allowed outside actors, especially the Russians, to insert themselves in the last election (and I have no doubts, despite his claims to being liberal, that Zuckerbeg wanted Trump to win, figuring Trump would let him and his gang of goons do what they want, no regulation, no fear of anything....and he was right)
4
“Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”
This is painfully trite. It is like a Churchill quote without the wit or the intelligence.
The whole idea of disruption is absurd in a world of constant change and innovation. Capitalism provides disruption, you don't have to go looking for it; it is built in.
If you want to see disruption look at a traditional company like GM. It wasn't transformed by silicon valley, it was transformed by competition and a brutal market. Tech needs to be disrupted by the same forces. They need to see what competition really is and what real disruption is.
6
The term "move fast and break things" comes from the DevOps movement in software development and speaks more to the instructive nature of failure than to tearing down of societal institutions.
Historically, software was developed on a slow, methodical cadence - rigorously defined, tested, and rolled out monthly, quarterly, or even annually - innovation was slow. By moving to a paradigm where software changes are delivered multiple times per day developers can see the outcome of those changes immediately and react accordingly. The feedback loop is much tighter and you learn from mistakes (aka "breaking stuff") much quicker. This is why Amazon and other modern tech shops deploy software tens of thousands of times per day.
While I am essentially disgusted with the direction Facebook has gone in the past 4-ish years it's unfortunate that many have conflated the "break stuff" verbiage meant for software changes with the "breaking of american institutions" which was never the intention of those words. I've never seen anyone in tech (or otherwise) suggest we apply the same methodology to society \ government as we do with software that allows us to crush virtual candy.
4
@Derek Evermore
The people running the show do, and that is the point. Trump was elected on basically that notion, of breaking American Institutions, and the people running the high tech companies enabled it (deliberately), because they saw in that wiping out of American institutions a chance to get even richer and more powerful. The shareholder management we have today is a classic example, it cares about only one thin g, stock price, it doesn't care about the impact of business decisions on people, countries, the world, it just cares if the stock price goes up. Companies at least used to pretend they were in it to do things in the world, make people's lives better, care about the people who worked for them, that went up in a puff of smoke (ironically, by the dear Professor's Harvard Business school especially) that was "stock price over all".
2
The tech mindset is rooted in dissatisfaction: see a problem, hack a solution. ("Hack" in the old-school sense of "cobble up".) This is what has always driven invention, and always will.
This mindset didn't seem to be problematic in Edison's time. What might be causing systemic distress today is that unprecedented amounts of money are available to fund every would-be Zuckerberg's dream. "Innovations" come at us like high-pressure water from a fire hose. Even if all of them were good ideas they'd be a lot for any society to take. Even beneficial disruptions that break up stifling incumbent businesses and industries can't be accommodated if they come at us too quickly. And we're slowly realizing that a lot of these ideas aren't good or beneficial.
I agree with Ms. Swisher that it wouldn't hurt for Silicon Valley's culture to take greater account of humane values other than efficiency. However, maybe some of those shoveling money at the industry (and others that share its mindset) ought to be held accountable for their reckless enabling of disruption for profit's sake. Insofar as they hold the purse strings, they're de facto management -- and should pay at least as much heed to Prof. Christensen's message.
There's nothing about disruption that requires the pursuit on monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior, nor is there anything about it that requires you to treat your employees as throwaway contractors or ignore it when some of your customers are hacking your product to destroy democracy.
All of these things are simply the result of lax government and corrupt corporate culture. These were certainly trends before Silicon Valley, in fact they've been trends for centuries. In fact, good antitrust laws, employee protection laws, and the widespread social shunning of morally weak people like Mark Zuckerberg are all supportive of disruptive innovation. Monopoly power and abuse of power are by contrast useful tools to stop disruptive innovation when it could be providing better goods and services.
8
Like the ideas of many brilliant, good people, his ideas worked their way down the layers of management where much lesser men used the words and did not have a clue about the ideas. Now we have deans of humanities departments using tag lines on e-mails, demanding their professors to be innovative. What did you innovate today? The innovations of a humanities department at any university make the Curia in Rome look like Uber in comparison. Still, the words sound good.
7
The PC story is the classic example of how IBM did not understand it had a disruptive innovation in its hands and let tiny Microsoft instead run with it.
And then there is Boeing who used disruptive innovation with its 737 Max. It should've worked, but all they cared about was profits instead of making sure the innovation did not kill its customers by proper testing and not cutting corners.
3
@wyatt
Actually, Boeing was the victim of of distruptive innovation. Airbus introduced a mid size plane that had engines that were much, much more fuel efficient then the then current 737. In response (panic really), Boeing made the decision basically to 'hack it', they tried retrofitting energy efficient engines to the 737 airframe, but had to mount the engines further out, which changed the dynamics of how it flies, made it unstable, so they patched the control system to overcome the instablity......and then ignored reports coming back from their engineers and test pilots of serious problems with it. They were worried about time to market so decided to do a quick hack, and ended up in deep, deep trouble. They should have redesigned the plane, didn't, and now are paying the price.
4
Here is something that I never really understood, I may, what is "destructive innovation?" Destructive to who or whom? Destructive to what? Societal norms? Some industry standard? "The Man?"
I get the "disruption" angle and grok the importance, but disruption for progress only will successfully happen with a strategy, clearly defined goals and objectives, the right resources and all within a framework that can prevent chaos. Disruption for disruption's sake is a disaster. Witness political affairs ....
3
Take the example of Apple’s AirPods and AirPods-pro for about $150 and $250 respectively. Innovative, as Apple likes to position them? Hardly! Not really better than their wired, long lasting and much cheaper counterparts. Yes, a little more convenient (wireless) but need to be constantly recharged to the point to being annoying. They last for a max of 2-3 years before the Li-ion battery effectively loses its charge holding capacity. Huge profit margin for Apple but society bears the cost of disposing of the toxic detritus of 100’s of millions of such devices. And these things are supposed to make our lives better....
17
He was a harbinger of progress similar to progress in many other areas of human endeavors that have resulted in unemployment from disruptive technologies. Added to that he was a man of exceptional moral and ethical values, something that is badly needed in politics and business.
3
I've worked in Silicon Valley companies for years, including a number of startups.
When people talk about "breaking things" in early stage startups, they're talking about breaking production services, i.e., they're voicing an explicit preference for execution speed over service reliability. It's a necessary tradeoff in startups, because you have very limited time to launch and grow successful or die.
I'm not defending the bad behavior of companies that push "innovations" that hurt society; I agree there are many examples of tech causing such problems. I'm just adding some historical context about what people meant by this phrase.
7
@Mike Schwartz
Some call it speed, I call it impatience.
You never hear these people these people talk about wreckage. You never hear about consequence, you only hear about results, preferably yesterday.
1
"Why use a violent and thoughtless word like “break” and not one more hopeful, like “change” or “transform” or “invent”? And, if “break” was to be the choice, what would happen after the breaking? Would there be fixing? Could there be any fixing after the breaking? “Break” sounded painful.”
you don’t fix it, you replace it with something different that does something else that makes what broke useless and so not worth repairing. progress!
4
Why would the tech industry need to "seek redemption"?
Anyway, Ms. Swisher never got around to telling us why.
3
"How you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope" and yet few would hope to die of cancer before seeing their 70th birthday. Point being, just because something sounds good - like many of Christensen's hypothesis - doesn't mean that it's true
4
@Matt Braun - The point is the quality of the journey.
8
"how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.”
A bit of a stretch, even in a eulogy. My guess is that only an insufferable narcissist would claim that kind of control over individual destiny. Lymphoma was not likely a part of Clayton Christensen's hopes.
5
@Sid Knight What I might better have said: Only a politician would claim that kind of credit for his successes.
3
IMO, techies are immune to non-binary suggestions. Should they read thomas wolfe, james baldwin, edna st. vincent millay, ernest hemingway? maybe. Should they have a library card? absolutely. No card = No lunch.
1
Large firms' customers will only adopt dramatic change if they've seen some other fools try it (successfully) first. Actually, the word "some" is incorrect. They need to see a big, safe sample size...
1
It's all about making money, and lots of it. Full stop.
3
I've personally had an aversion to the phrase "disruptive innovation", because like so many similar concepts-that-have-been-boiled-down-to-a-few-words almost as soon as it was coined its meaning was de-nuanced to the point of being insulting, or more; in Swisher's words, destructive
Is it really more valuable than "think outside the box" in how it pertains to advancing known industries? I don't believe so. That doesn't mean we shouldn't cast aside what we believe are fixed points in order to consider avenues those "fixed points" block us from exploring.
It does mean, however, that maybe the best thing I've ever heard from Swisher – why "break" things, and not "fix"? – should have been paid attention to a long, long time ago.
3
If anyone is at all interested in education reform I highly recommend Clayton's book "Disrupting Class". The availability of free online content that students can access at their own time and ability parameters will cause an outflow of students that will leave public ed, that is unable to adjust, with more and more empty seats which equates to lost butts in the seats based funding. When high schoolers realize they could just gather at their convenience at the wifi-enabled food court at the mall they will exit the brick and mortar leaving public ed with the least ambitious and less capable in the remaining seats.
1
@Rob Wood
Right. Without structure or a set vision. Just random information gathering without thought for veracity or a clear goal.
1
I think it's always been a mistake to see tech industry innovators and leaders as anything other than very ambitious people who like to make, or have other people make, things that they think are cool, and who want to make as much money as possible. Of course it was nice for their egos to paint them as morally superior to other business leaders, but they never were. We've seen repeatedly how any ideals they've had, or at least that they've professed, have been dropped as soon as they've gotten in the way of growing the business and increasing profits and control. I hope Ms. Swisher can accept that there's no point in nostalgia for a time of tech = good. Tech is what we make it. There's no intrinsic reason why business leaders in tech should be any more idealistic in practice than business leaders in fossil fuels or finance. And it appears that they aren't.
7
@Stephen Merritt
Right, the actual mystery is why adult journalists (anyone over 30, say) fell for the, ah, nonsense (and echoed it repeatedly) that tech companies were genuinely in it for the common good. There have NEVER been for-profit organizations whose primary mission is anything other than making money.
2
@Stephen Merritt
They are the new robbers barons of the their very own new Gilded Age. Never have the very rich been so rich.
1
I owe a great debt to Clayton. In 2003 I published a book (McGraw Hill) on VoIP (a disruptive technology that has replaced phone service as we once knew it) using his mantra of "cheaper, simpler, smaller, more convenient to use" as individual chapters. This is the beauty I found in my now well worn copy of Innovator's Dilemma: just ask yourself how yours or a competing product or service fits into each of those categories.
5
I watch elderly people, including my own parents, who are baffled by the setup and configuration complexity of using VoIP successfully. They waste an amazing amount of their time trying to understand this disruptive technology. Most of these people aren’t skilled enough to service it. Businesses who implement disruptive tech use it as a replacement or augmented service offering as an ‘improvement’. For VoIP, in almost every case, a plain old telephone line from Ma Bell is superior, and at a fraction of the cost.
Disruptive technology is a burden for most people, and unnecessary. Commerce is what drives the ‘push’ to implement and adopt. A lot of times those products are not even fully ready to be brought to market, but the ‘speed to market’ fantasy is that ‘we can fix it as we go’.
The truth is that most ‘productivity’ technology is a burden to consumers, and the benefit is a profit center or a marketing channel to a company. That’s an exploit, not a benefit.
There’s a lot of that spread liberally in the messaging but companies influence and pedal their wares like modern snake oil salesmen.
10
VOIP enables the company to get numbers assigned within minutes vs. weeks, creates ubiquitous caller ID that has almost eliminated obscene phone calls, and provides services that even millionaires did not have in the 60’s and 70’s, when I grew up. Watch a movie or TV show from that era and observe how the characters used phones and how the devices appear in plot elements. Have your elderly friends get help from a another senior if they have problems.
1
@ChrisH
Not to mention a secure landline during predictable electrical outages is a safety issue and the exorbitant cost of maintaining the landline is not a "benefit". (Yes I know maintenance is not cheap but carriers have a charter to provide service.)
Even with electricity on I just ended yet another VoIP call where words were incomprehensible. Plus the Internet is slow beyond past experience this week. I called back on my landline, no problem.
Scientists and technologists are not prophets.
Science and technology has nothing to do with the supernatural.
About 70% of physical reality is a mysterious force we call dark energy. Another 25% of the real universe is a magic mass called dark matter. While the 5% of reality that we know and understand are divided by theories of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity that can't be reconciled.
See ' The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' Thomas J. Kuhn; Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; Godel Incompleteness Theorem
3
@Blackmamba might as well name drop Chaos Theory and Catastrophe Theory (remember that one?) as well.
By the time Professor Christensen's book was published, Bill Gates had already run roughshod over antitrust law and given future innovators the game plan for decisively breaking things. Instead of ending up in jail he ratcheted his company's criminal conviction and slap on the wrist fine into his current sinecure as the dispenser of so-called wisdom to a troubled world. Zuckerberg is his clone. Whatever wisdom Professor Christensen may have preached, it obviously did not sink in with the masters of the universe. It seems that he was a decent man, and may he rest in peace for trying.
19
@highway
Quite right. 20/20 hindsight is always wonderfully acute. In retrospect, rather than following Christensen's edicts, we might all have been better off if old fashioned anti-trust laws had been more scrupulously enforced.
9
@highway
Yes, and "disrupters" Uber and Airbnb are hugely successful due to a business model explicitly based on illegal activity rife with externalities that the public pays the cost for, while the companies accrue the profit.
8
@Mike Z The small companies bought by Microsoft and shut down would agree with you!
Superficially, the quotes offered by Ms. Swisher from Professor Christensen's last book ("How Will You Measure Your Life?") may seem wise. But in fact, they have zero value to our social ethic. Read them carefully. Essentially, they encourage inflexibility and absolutism, an inability to adapt to changing conditions. They could equally justify highly virtuous principles and terribly destructive principles. Sorry to say, I don't think the professor ever quite worked out a solution to the problems he described and promoted.
4
Right. However, if Anti-trust Laws were scrupulously enforced many Senators and Representatives financial portfolios would not benefit from insider knowledge and trading. Oh my.
5
Jill Lepore effectively debunked the disruption idea. (June 23, 2014 New Yorker Magazine.) The historical examples that the argument depends on do not support the idea.
6
Before Christensen, there was Joseph Schumpeter and creative destruction. Between Schumpeter's time and Christensen's, the idea that businesses had a social responsibility collapsed.
Where once IBM put employees and communities ahead of shareholders, business schools following Milton Friedman taught students the only responsibility of business was to maximize shareholder value. Because that's the way to make the most money, at everyone else's expense.
Students were taught there's a legal responsibility to put shareholders first. Which there isn't.
So Christensen had good ideas about innovation just as business, including tech, decided it didn't care about anything except profits.
And here we are.
17
Yes, as Professor Christensen advised, innovation can be disruptive, but its usefulness and lure can be so powerful that any potential harm is dismissed or disregarded altogether. An earlier example was the automobile, especially after Henry Ford and others made it financially available to the middle class.
Attempts to regulate its operation by imposing driver’s licenses requirements, traffic laws and eventually with seat belts and pollution controls were met with hostility.
Perhaps it is time to include the teaching of responsible and ethical use of innovation to our children as early as middle school. They might then understand, with ever-advancing technology, as did our ancestors with the automobile: A car is capable of a speed of 100 mph, but it is reckless and very dangerous to drive that fast.
7
@A Southern Bro
Start teaching them in the home way before middle school.
Thank you for a thoughtful, interesting tribute.
We should all be thinking about How We'll Measure Our Lives and 'allocate our resources'.
7
I read "The Innovator's Dilemma" recently, and was struck by how much the concept of "disruptive innovation" has drifted from Christensen's original description.
Today's tech seems to think that "disruption" is anything that breaks up a large existing industry. Mature areas, from education to refrigeration, are proclaimed "ripe for disruption" simply because they are large markets using mature technologies.
But Christensen didn't say "find a mature technology serving a large market, and replace it." He said that "disruptive" technologies are introduced to serve a market that is too small or too poor to draw the attention of the big players. Once the technology has a market, it gradually becomes more effective, drawing a larger and larger share of the market until it outcompetes and ultimately replaces the mature technology.
In other words, a disruptive technologist doesn't set out to bring down an existing industry, but to serve an unfilled need. In a different set of hands, the idea of "disruptive technology" could have inspiring: it is a call to develop technologies that serve poor, disabled, or isolated people who have been overlooked by conventional industries. It is a shame that, instead, "disruptive technology" has come to mean "let me find what I can break."
53
Thanks for sharing this wisdom! Clay was a kind and caring servant leader.
9
You have done us a great favor with this piece. I imagine a Kara Swisher book: Disruptive and Destructive — The Way of Tech. Take 10 years and think it over. In the mean time, accept my thanks for a very useful story of a very useful life.
12
The Innovator's Solution was part of the engineering curriculum where I went.
The solution was to spin out smaller affiliated nodes that could compete with the disruptors on their low margin, highly responsive, creative scale. Our tech didn't do that either though, preferring the brute force method of absorbing any upstart that could ever become a competitor. If they had listened to Professor Christensen we'd all be happier, both Tech and humans.
It's not too late, though it is too late to give Tech titans a history lesson. The first rule of history lessons was Stability, Stability, STability. If their position is they don't have any responsibility for the power they've consolidated by breaking our things with fast moving tech, then who is?
3
Working in the field of new technology development, I remember feeling uncomfortable when the term "disruptive innovation" became popular. It seemed more about a teenage boy fantasy to destroy stuff without much thought about what damage or responsibility the disruptive innovation might bring or how to use it to improve our world.
And here we are today. With the biggest tech companies gathering every bit of personal and finacial data we have and selling it as their business model, while doing nothing to stop or even slow down the money-making channels of false information and inaccurate propaganda that flow through their systems. The tech industry is "moving fast" to create more powerful systems of control and surveillance than humans have ever known and we can't seem to do anything about it.
20
Tech is full of different types of players. Some have bad reputations like Zuckerberg. Some have good reputations like Berners-Lee. Some have reputations that are getting worse (Gates and Musk and Bezos all have links to Epstein). Some are so amorphous that no one can tell what they do (DARPA, IARPA). If your goal is to make a lot of money, tech can be the place to do it. If your goal is doing great science, you might get taken advantage of. It can be hard to tell whom to trust. Tech is no longer in the realm of ideas. It's all about commodification.
19
Thank for the wonderful reminder of Professor Christensen, Kara. I was an business training consultant at the time and his ideas quickly became the subject of many a group and class discussion. Large corporations changed strategies when new technologies slipped in to disrupt the status quo. I’ve located Professor Christensen’s book in my library and intend to review it.
4
I have long thought that the notion of market "disruption" derived from Joseph Schumpeter's famous notion of "creative destruction." Schumpeter was not promoting creative destruction; he was describing capitalism's constant, churning instability, and reasoning that it would eventually doom capitalism.
The glib and facile embrace of "disruption" by tech capitalists represents evidence in favor of Schumpeter's ideas.
29
Ever hear of Univac?
I was part of the team workng on a new mainframe system called Roanoke. Management cancelled it because key customers didn’t want drastic change.
10
@Melvyn Magree
Big company's tend to be risk-adverse. A big company selling products to other big companies, compounds the issue.
The problem is that leads to innovation stagnation to both big company buyers and big company vendors, which opens the door to smaller companies being able to innovate. The result is companies like Univac, Sperry-Rand, Control Data, Digital Equipment Corporation, and array of other can go from Fortune 500 companies to the dustbin of history in a decade.
5
“First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies.”
And that is exactly NOT how Silicon Valley works.
If you want an example, look at the iPhone. It was neither simpler, nor cheaper, it was expressly designed for the purpose of higher margins and greater profits, it was first commercialized in a very significant and large market, and it was hyped to be a mass-market success from day one.
But hey, we all need our own mythology.
18
Don't think of the iPhone, think of the original iPod, the frivolous seeming Trojan horse that ultimately morphed into the iPhone product line.
22
How about: don’t think about the iPod, think about what came before: Napster vs. purchasing music on physical media.
10
@Bob The Builder Funny comment stream. You all went straight to music services or devices as the progenitors of the iPhone. But the iPhone merely consolidated a whole bunch of insignificant, niche market disrupters. Remember Palmtops? Palm Pilots? MP3 players before iPod? Flip phones? Apple understands market cycles very well and has generally avoided the initial disruption, but learns very well when it sees one coming. Capitalizing on someone else's risk taking is a business strategy, too.
20
Wonderful advice. I sense that the tech world lacks what many other industries lack these day, Purpose. We need to think outside of profits and focus on how we are improving life on this planet.
34
@NKM
The problem with a lot of the technology brought to market in the last 15 years or so it that the technology is not necessary new it's just used in different ways.
There is absolutely nothing technologically groundbreaking about Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, etc. It's all based on technology that existed at the time their creation.
Most of the new cellphones that have come out in the past decade are just piggybacking on advances in semiconductor technology, most of these advances are incremental. Even the advent of 5G is to provide faster connectivity. Products will be built to use 5G in ways that haven't been done before to take advantage of the faster technology. Again. this is just new products piggybacking off new technology.
About the only fields that have been truly innovative in the last decade are the use of technology for monitoring vital signs and medical conditions.
3
I have always maintained that Alan Turing, the great British computer whiz of WW2, if alive today, could leaf through a few tech journals for a few hours and understand 99 per cent of what we think is earthshaking new tech in 2020. Hedy Lamar, an actress in the same period,had a patent for the concepts that became cell phones. I think if the giants of physics from the years between the World Wars returned, they would ask what have you been been doing for the last 80 years. You simply rebottled our wine in new bottles, with a few new flavors added.
We have not had anything really new since the 40’s. Smaller and faster is not really new.
1
christensen's _the innovator's dilemma_ is deservedly celebrated for its coining of the phrase "disruptive innovation," but it also described a compelling theory of how successful big companies fail as a consequence of a compulsion to stay with aging yet high margin technologies.
some disruptive tech companies delight in breaking things, others don't. so often the founder's personality serves as a template for corporate culture. similarly, a quick survey of fallen giants also implicates ceo hubris and megalomania. (eg, welch at ge; ghosn at nissan; even balmer at microsoft during its lost decade.)
15
“Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”
-- Clay Christensen
"Be careful what you wish for." -- Anton Chigurth
13
@Jim
"I'm bein asked to stand for somethin that I dont have the same belief in it I once did. Asked to believe in somethin I
might not hold with the way I once did. That's the problem. I failed at it even when I did. Now I've seen it held to the light. Seen any number of believers fall away. I've been forced to look at it again and I've been forced to look at myself."
-- Sheriff Bell
9
@Jim
Christensen was a Mormon with its often obtuse adherence to some questionable origins and tenets. I wondered when he would disrupt the male dominance of his church and its five children to enter heaven.
His theoretical approach often missed even bigger pictures like failure over time and unforeseen risks not to mention structural and cultural issues. Kiretsu comes to mind as an agent of positive information collection.
I love how people become so enamored with things that they think it's never been done before. Brand new, bright and shiny. Sorry to disappoint. History repeats itself. Just much quicker than in the past centuries.
12
Peter Drucker once quipped we have so many 'Gurus' because it's easier to spell than 'Charlatans'. While Christensen had a valid idea, let's not make him a visionary genius for it.
I recall hearing him as a guest speaker talking about disruption, and how it is the way for growth, but being quite dumbfounded when asked about the purpose of such growth.
49
@Chef Another "bang"! I was in the "valley" in the 90s and 2000s and if the term "disruptive" got bandied around I would have to ask, "yes, but did it improve current approaches and practices or did it just disrupt? The collateral damage from disrupting for disrupting's sake is never factored in. What's the old military adage, "what's the upside and what's the downside and can we afford the downside?" I'm paraphrasing of course but VC firms are still afflicted with drunk-sailor-syndrome in terms of dispensing/flushing money by funding some goofy stuff that never had a business plan to succeed in the first place but rather to create a buzz, possibly get acquired, and offer a handful of early investors and employs a sweet payout if acquired (e.g., Oculus - what problem did they solve that benefits anyone, oh, the founders, it made 'em rich, problem solved). Look at those entitled and obnoxious eScooter companies? They wouldn't behave like "disrupters" if they're investors were more like Mafioso and said, "look, you get the startup capital but you need to show a profit within two years or we chop off a finger for each quarter you disrupted but didn't show any return on our investment. Man would those bears dance.
11
I have always interpreted "to break" in software development and testing as, "to find a bug or flaw in the software code in order to fix it and make the code better before releasing to end users." So, "Move fast and break things" = iterate fast, fix bugs, repeat. It's testing/ QA quality control lingo. Not really to do with destroying. But, point taken.
20
@Wow - I worked there. The signs were not about QA.
16
@Wow You be wrong. The arrogance, self centeredness, self righteousness, and immaturity of "move fast and break things" has always been immensely damaging to society. And in its own way helped give us Trump.
It is a testament to Professor Christensen’s brilliance that his book, “How Will You Measure Your Life” emerged from a commencement address he gave at Harvard. Not only is the book inspiring for personal guidance but it reads like the most accessible mini-MBA course one would want. His construct of problem, anecdote, and unconventional solution made it a fast read for me - even with all the highlighting I did. The chapter analyzing “what is that milkshake for” covers everything from strategy to market research to operations and product refinement - all in a very entertaining storytelling style. We can only hope his legacy will be strong and what now barely passes for “industry case histories” in MBA programs will give way to the research, insights and ideas he wrote about so beautifully.
14
Thank you!
For a better world, more people should listen to what you wrote.
Then we might not be as divided.
4
You imply that people in the tech industry have sacrificed their principles. Isn’t it more likely that they have bought into the dominant ideology that the Right has been advancing for decades, perfectly embodied by their current leader—that pursuing one’s own profit & self-interest is a moral principle?
61
@Martin
That concept predates the U.S.A., by centuries.
4
Just as important as understanding tech, is understanding endless growth may actually be hurting our economy—and our planet. Economist Kate Raworth makes a compelling case for “doughnut economics”: an alternative way to look at the economic systems ruling our societies and imagine a sustainable future for all. Can’t wait for President Sanders to bring her influence into our national perspective.
22
It seems to me that the tech mantras of "breaking" and "disrupting" -- usually without regard to whether what comes next is actually better -- are quite related to the mindless "drain the swamp" sentiment among the members of the Cult of Trump.
In both cases, the true believers are so caught up in their love for the new thing (and often hatred for the old thing) that they can't see that destroying the old thing could be very damaging. There is a simple-minded confidence that what comes next must be better, even though we keep finding it to be worse.
It's a kind of laziness in which it appears easier to just destroy and rebuild, rather than face the more complicated but likely more beneficial work of changing things incrementally.
78
@Cary
What the one and only biological DNA genetic human race primate ape that began in Africa 300,000 years ago did Professor Christensen not accept nor understand about our human natural behavior evolutionary fit management skills?
Our human nature and nurture drives us to crave fat, salt, sugar, habitat, water, kin and sex by any means necessary including conflict and cooperation. Humans spent the first 290.000 years of their existence as active hunter gatherers.
Humans are much closer to the patriarchal sex and violent nature of our chimpanzee cousins than they are to the matriarchal peaceful sex driven society of our bonobo kin,
2