| 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. |