Disruption, Disrupted
The life and times of Silicon Valley’s most notorious buzzword.
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There are plenty of corporate buzzwords out there, many distorted beyond recognition by overuse, misuse, and, ultimately, abuse. But few have histories filled with as much turbulence and dispute as “disruption.”
Today, the word hardly means anything at all. It’s invoked willy-nilly to imply innovation and refer to just about any kind of newness. But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when “disruption” meant something quite specific. Let me take you back.
The origin story
The year was 1995. Celebrities wore too much denim, TLC ruled the radio, and The Harvard Business Review had just published an article by a little-known professor named Clayton M. Christensen.
In “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,” Christensen posited a theory as to why industry-leading companies failed to maintain leadership over the long haul, missing opportunities and playing catchup with the smaller companies that had seized them first.
The theory went something like this: Industry-leading companies ignore technologies that — initially anyway — don’t meet the immediate needs of their customers. Instead, they focus on sustaining technologies that deliver just what customers demand.
Meanwhile, disruptive technologies “introduce a very different package of attributes from the one mainstream customers historically value.” They get off the ground by creating entirely new markets and winning overlooked, non-mainstream customers.
Once a disruptive product has become established, sustaining innovations allow the technology to soon appeal to the mainstream customers who’d initially ignored it. With a foothold in a new market and the steady poaching of mainstream customers, disruptive technologies and the companies that create them soon outstrip and oust industry leaders.
Following the release of the article, everybody wanted to be disruptive. Disruption found its way into product descriptions, company manifestos, mission statements, and marketing materials of every flavor. The word took on a culture of its own — one that seemed to imply an ethos of piracy, coupling innovation with destruction. It was disrupt or be disrupted, do or die, kill or be killed. No room for fencesitters or status quos.
By 2015, the original meaning was entirely lost, and Clayton Christensen once again took to the pages of HBR to refine his theory and challenge its misuse.
“In our experience, too many people who speak of ‘disruption’ … use the term loosely to invoke the concept of innovation in support of whatever it is they wish to do. [They] use ‘disruptive innovation’ to describe any situation in which an industry is shaken up and previously successful incumbents stumble. But that’s much too broad.”
The word took on a culture of its own — one that seemed to imply an ethos of piracy, coupling innovation with destruction. It was disrupt or be disrupted, do or die, kill or be killed. No room for fence-sitters or status quos.
The Uber debate
The article targets one company in particular which, again and again, has been called ‘disruptive:’ Uber.
“Uber is clearly transforming the taxi business in the United States,” writes Christensen. “But is it disrupting the taxi business?” He says it’s not, for two reasons:
1. For a technology to be disruptive, it must begin in either a low-end market or a new market. Uber didn’t create a new market for people who needed rides, nor did it begin in a low-end market (Uber users were the same people who could already afford taxis).
2. The first customers of a truly disruptive technology cannot be mainstream. Typically, mainstream customers avoid disruptive products because the lower price tag is not worth the diminished product quality. But mainstream customers were with Uber from the get-go; the service was never really inferior to taxis.
So, there you have it. In a few pages, Christensen corrected us all. Uber, the one-time poster child of this whole disruption concept had been wholly misconceived as disruptive in the first place.
But then, another twist. In early 2016, Alex Moazed and Nicholas Johnson of the platform innovation company Applico, published an article in TechCrunch titled, “Why Clayton Christensen is Wrong about Uber and Disruptive Innovation.”
The fight for a disruptive Uber resumed.
Faulty foundations
But before this correction and counter-correction, another voice emerged to call into question the very foundations of disruption theory: Harvard prof Jill Lepore.
In “The Disruption Machine: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong,” a piece published in The New Yorker, Lepore painstakingly re-examines Christensen’s evidence for disruption theory. Many of Christensen’s claims rely on handpicked case studies — a method Lepore calls, “a notoriously weak foundation on which to build a theory.”
Beginning with the disk-drive industry, then moving on to cable-operated excavators, discount stores, and steel manufacturers, Lepore questions all of Christensen’s favorite case studies. Did the disk drive giants actually topple? What about the leaders of the cable-operated excavators? Or discount stores — disruptors of the department store — did they really come out on top? And how about steel? Did mini-mill manufacturers really displace the big guys?
To all these questions, Lepore’s answer is no. She discovers holes and omissions of inconvenient evidence. “Christensen,” she says, “tends to ignore facts that don’t support his theory.”
And then there’s the trouble with the iPhone. Around the time of the iPhone launch, Christensen said to Business Week, “the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone. History speaks pretty loudly on that.” We all know how things turned out here. “Disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact,” wrote Lepore. “History speaks loudly, apparently, only when you can make it say what you want it to say.”
Of course, the battle raged on from here. Christensen rebutted in Bloomberg. An article in TechCrunch picked up the cause. And on and on it went.
Not the conclusion
Disruption began innocently enough. A phenomenon, and a word to describe the phenomenon.
Then it got picked up. People liked the sound of it. They liked what they thought it meant. They wielded it for their own reasons, caring little about learning what it actually denoted. And, like a child star whose sense of self decreases with the influx of fame, disruption basked in the sunlight of popularity, loving being known while losing all its substance. The parents, seeing only dollar signs, cast it back and forth, formed it into convenient shapes, used it to fuel their own agendas.
Then, the business of Lepore, of setting records straight, of twists, rebuttals, and rebuffs. The quagmire of vague and also precise meanings, of evidence to support and evidence to undermine.
Of course, this is not the conclusion. New articles will emerge. Books will be written. Tinkerers will tinker. Marketers will market.
But perhaps, somewhere out there, positioned at a standing desk in the open floor office of another startup getting ready to innovate the bejesus out of you, a copywriter with pen in hand will scratch out the word ‘disruptive’ before the product name and, with a Clint Eastwood squint toward the future, will replace it with something just a little bit better.
