Damage Control: Disrupting the Disrupters

摘要

Harvard historian Jill Lepore's takedown of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation in The New Yorker has been getting a lot of attention-some of it defensive and critical, including candid remarks from Christensen himself in an interview at Bloomberg Business-week, in which he characterizes her piece as "a criminal act of dishonesty." Twitter subsequently presented me with a fascinating analysis of how this theory has influenced higher education. The author, University of California (UC) Santa Barbara professor Chris Newfield, provides a short history of how Christensen's theory reversed a management trend popularized in the 1980s and 1990s, by Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence), Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline), and Peter Drucker (who outlined the rise of a knowledge economy and the decline of capital as an instrument of wealth-creation in Post-Capitalist Society). These theorists believed that a technological society would depend on empowering knowledge workers, who ideally would have the latitude to take action to keep companies ahead of change. Newfield traces Christensen's lineage to Joseph A. Schumpeter of "creative destruction" fame.