From Library Babel Fish, June 18, 2014
Disruption. Creative Destruction. Innovation. Entrepreneurship – terms we’ve heard constantly in recent years, with certain irrelevance and the total collapse of the world as we know it as the inescapable alternative. We’re supposed to think like a startup, though given the failure rate of startups, I’m not sure why – maybe that’s the destructive part of this version of creativity. The message always seems to be “you can’t do things the same way anymore, and if you don’t change really fast to anticipate the future, you’re doomed,” regardless of what the change is or whether it’s positive or simply a malign force, like an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, that cannot be avoided.
Jill Lepore traces the history of this notion of “disruption” and takes it apart very intelligently at The New Yorker. She faults Clayton Christensen, the Disruption King, for the way he lays out his argument in his popular book, The Innovator’s Dilemma:
The strength of a prediction made from a model depends on the quality of the historical evidence and on the reliability of the methods used to gather and interpret it. Historical analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof. None of these conditions have been met.
Later, after taking apart the case studies upon which Christensen’s theory is built and putting it all in a historical context (which the theory had avoided doing), she points out that a theory of business success shouldn’t be applied to everything.
Faith in disruption is the best illustration, and the worst case, of a larger historical transformation having to do with secularization, and what happens when the invisible hand replaces the hand of God as explanation and justification. Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries.
Curiously, this is where a Slate writer faults for overreach, suggesting she’s just sore that her own field, journalism, is being disrupted. But following that paragraph, she points specifically to The New York Times‘ Innovation Report, focusing on the separation between the news side and the business side of any news operation. She questions the recklessness of making it more permeable, as the report recommends, because it will threaten the very reason the paper is in business: great reporting. Without that, there will be no product to sell, no brand to promote. It’s a very good example (and one I’ve mulled over myself) of what’s dangerously deluded about this highly-influential theory that has no clothes.
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