Jill Lepore had the cover of the New Yorker this month with her piece ‘The Disruption Machine’. The piece has been marketed as a ‘takedown’ of both the disruption dogma that pervades across Silicon Valley (and its vassal states in other countries), and of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s academic work, which first identified and elucidated the theory of disruptive innovation.
I read Lepore’s article the day it came out and came away thinking it was a particularly shoddy piece of argumentation and writing (though, people I trust insist Lepore’s academic and journalistic work is usually of a really high quality). Since it was published, Slate published a very funny and clever takedown. And more importantly, Christensen himself responded in outraged and withering terms in an interview with Business Week. This is a good primer on the concept (if you're not familiar with the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovations, for instance).
None of the articles are so long that you can’t read them yourself, and I'd recommend that you do. I instead want to focus on what I saw as an irony in Lepore's work: that her takedown of disruption illustrates the value of a mindset that believes in and pursues disruption.
The circumspect, incumbent academic critic takes on The Innovator’s Dilemma with ‘sustaining innovations’ - critiques of the causal reasoning, or of the evidence, based on years of research and qualifications of a similar kind to Christensen’s. In doing so, they advance the theory, even if they do so by being critical of it.
This critic would never launch headlong into a ‘takedown’ of an entire academic body of work in a magazine - but a disrupter would. A disrupter would use their advantage in speed (don’t study various industries for two decades, just read Christensen’s work and do some secondary research), simplicity (don’t have endnotes, reams of citations and folders of evidence) and distribution (publish in a national magazine, rather than in books and business school classes with selective entry requirements) to disrupt the theory.
The sustainer would never have the nerve to take down Christensen in a single magazine article. But the disrupter - the person that thinks a car hire service can break global taxi monopolies, the person that thinks streaming TV can humble the cable giants, the person that thinks cat gifs can sink the newspaper barons - would. The attitude that says “I’m a smart person, I can take on the incumbent and win despite having less experience, fewer resources and a worse product” is the attitude of the disrupter.
Often, the disrupter fails. As Lepore does here. But sometimes they succeed. And without an society that promotes that disruptive mindset (which I can’t help but feel is off-puttingly arrogant - which is probably why I haven’t disrupted anything), we don’t have the disruption. Disruption is over-used, sure. But I think it’s more than a theory - it’s a mindset that enables big changes and improvements that make people’s lives better (without of course, being the only source of progress in the world).
And as always, with disruption, even while you’re disrupting, you can be disrupted. The Slate takedown opens with a very funny analogy: a New Yorker feature articles take months to write and requires paying expensive writers and teams of fact checkers and editors. Then you have to print the magazine and ship it around the country. Meanwhile, someone at Slate can read the article, do a few Google searches and knock out in half a day a piece that, while lower quality, was far cheaper. In this case, it also succeeded in ripping strips of the original.
I for one am happy to live in an era where that kind of moxy if encouraged.