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.
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You know how they say about weak thinking, "the part that's good is not new, the part that's new is not good?" Disruption is like the opposite of that. There were versions of it that came before, but they weren't very good. He pulled the perspective together in a powerful way.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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(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.
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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"
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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/ …
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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.
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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
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