Oh whoa, Clayton Christensen died? Damn. Probably the single most important business thinker of the last century. I'd put him ahead of even Drucker and Porter. The first to take a fundamentally technology-informed approach to business thinking, rather than people or economics.
-
-
Alfred Chandler is probably the only one I'd put in his class. Even though Chandler wrote a lot more and Christensen was in some sense a one-big-trick pony. Even his own attempts to augment or build on disruption theory proved to be footnotes to the basic ideas at best.
Show this thread -
That's not a criticism, it's a way to appreciate the totalizing power of the disruption idea, which critics hate. The more it got parodied, overloaded, and abused, the more it demonstrated its basic rightness and depth of power.
Show this thread -
You could even say Christensen "killed" business strategy as a formal discipline. After disruption theory, the strategy literature kinda died. It was similar to OODA in conflict theory (in fact, you could argue it is isomorphic to OODA theory). Both transformed what they touched.
Show this thread -
(It was widely rumored that many of his peers hated him for this...) Disruption killed 90% of "strategy", especially the part pretending to be a science, via analysis without synthesis that highlighted the rarity/near-impossibility of self-disruption.
Show this thread -
To the extent "strategy" is "self-disruption", and to the extent it is a distinct function only in larger orgs, disruption theory = "shut down your strategy department. Let the startups drive things"
Show this thread -
One of the earliest posts I wrote on ribbonfarm was about disruption (trying to clarify muddiness in usage of the term via conflation with 'radical'). July 2007, in the first month of the blog.https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/07/23/disruptive-versus-radical-innovations/ …
Show this thread -
I think I can sincerely say that half my consulting work is framed by disruption theory in one way or another. It's by now so deep in the business unconscious that everybody talks in terms of his theory, many without even realizing it.
Show this thread -
Everybody in the business and technology world should have a drink in his honor this weekend. I recommend bourbon, the disruptor of scotch.pic.twitter.com/QGSg2h8fXF
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.