Unless you ’re an avid reader of the form of account book chief executive officer tote around , you may not have find out of Clayton Christensen . You have , however , felt the wallop of his work . Christensen , who died at 67 on Thursday due to complications from cancer discourse , is the scholar responsible for for coining the terminal figure ‘ turbulent innovation . ’ You know , hurly burly — the word all your best-loved tech tycoons like to bandy about .
Christensen first published his disruptive innovation theory back in 1995 in theHarvard Business Review . It later pluck up steam after the issue of his 1997 book , The Innovator ’s quandary : When New Technologies Cause with child Firms to Fail . Put simply , the hypothesis define a ‘ disruptive excogitation ’ as one that make a new market by upending an existing one that came before it . Central to the theory is that troubled invention start off as gimcrack alternatives that mostly attract to a niche market place , before finally overtaking big - name competitors . A coarse example is the Ford Model T , which was the first approachable and low-cost car to replace horse - draw perambulator . ( Mass - bring forth automobiles , which started with the Model T , are considered troubled under Christensen ’s possibility , but car that came before it were so expensive , only rich mass could buy them . )
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The Innovator ’s Dilemma quickly garner a spot on many tech CEOs ’ reading inclination . Intel CEO Andy Grovefamously stood up at COMDEX , a trade show in Las Vegas , and bluster it as the most important book he ’d read in a decade . Steve Jobs was also a sports fan ; accord to his biographer Walter Isaacson , Christensen ’s book was theonly business tomeon Jobs ’s inclination of most influential books . Netflix CEO Reed Hastings reportedly had 25 - 30 Netflix employeesdiscuss the bookat a company retreat . Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also had his top executivesread another Christensen book , The Innovator ’s Solution . Given how Silicon Valley fundamentally worship this Koran and the phrase ‘ dislocation , ’ you could call Christensen the OG influencer of influencers .
The remainder , as they say , is history . Now you’re able to barely go two indorsement in a tech company ’s press league before some executive proposes disrupt something . That say , ‘ interruption ’ in vulgar use has since morph further aside from Christensen ’s original possibility . These days , Silicon Valley , Wall Street , and media have often used it incorrectly to describe “ fresh ” or “ novel ” technologies or production .
The term ’s widespread abuse had reportedly left Christensen feeling chagrined . In a 2016Quartz interview , Christensen bewail that the term disruption stand for a lot of thing to dissimilar mass who then used it as justification to do whatever they require without actually understanding the theory or reading his book .
“ The population of people where the fewest have take the volume are speculation capitalists , ” Christensen assure Quartz . “ They are arrogant and bright and why do they need to read something . ” When asked how he felt about being associated with the ‘ herculean brand of disruption , ’ Christensen replied , “ I have never want to be notable . ”
So next prison term you get wind a tech bro utilise the terminus ‘ disruption ’ incorrectly , peradventure do Christensen a solid and state them why they ’re wrong .
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