Disrupting Mr Disrupter

choi

Schumoeter is the name of a co.lumn in Economist magazine, after the economist of that name.

Schumpeter | Disrupting Mr Disrupter; Clay Christensen should not be given the last word on disruptive innovation. Economist, Nov 28, 2015.
http://www.economist.com/news/bu ... ation-disrupting-mr

Note:
(a) "TWENTY years ago a then obscure academic at Harvard Business School published a career-making article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), warning established companies that they were in grave danger from being disrupted. Today Clay Christensen is an established company in his own right. * * * He even has his own consulting operation to help him stretch his brand."
(i) Joseph L Bower and Clayton M Christensen, Disruptive Technologies; Catching the Wave. Harvard Business Review, January-February 1995.
https://hbr.org/1995/01/disruptive-technologies-catching-the-wave
(ii) "Today Clay Christensen is an established company in his own right." This sentence is both a fact and figurative.
(A) fact: Dr Christensen (who holds a DBA (1992) and MBA (1979), both from Harvard Business School) and Mark W Johnson are co-founders of Innosight  (based in Lexington, a suburb of Boston).
(B) figurative: The penultimate paragraph pf this article says, “It would be going too far to predict that Christensen Inc will itself be disrupted out of existence: there are plenty of businesses ripe for his variety of innovation (not least his own, higher education).

(b) "But the risk is that by paying too much attention to his theory, they will miss other disruptive threats. This thought is provoked by a new HBR article on the subject, written by Mr Christensen along with Michael Raynor and Rory McDonald."

Clayton M Christensen, Michael Raynor and Rory McDonald, What Is Disruptive Innovation?  HBR, December 2015.
https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation

choi

(c) "Critics have picked holes * * * In June last year Jill Lepore, a colleague at Harvard University, caused a stir with a takedown in the New Yorker magazine. In September Andrew King and Baljir Baatartogtokh published a more sober article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, arguing that “the majority” of Mr Christensen’s 77 case studies did not fully fit his theory."
(i) takedown (n): "a wrestling maneuver in which an opponent is swiftly brought to the mat from a standing position"
www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/de ... an_english/takedown
(ii)
(A) Jill Lepore, The Disruption Machine; What the gospel of innovation gets wrong. New Yorker, June 23, 2014
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine
(Michael "Porter was interested in how companies succeed. The scholar who in some respects became his successor, Clayton M Christensen, entered a doctoral program at the Harvard Business School in 1989 and joined the faculty in 1992. Christensen was interested in why companies fail. * * * In 1942, Schumpeter theorized about 'creative destruction' [in a book titled  Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy] * * * In 2007, Christensen told Business Week that 'the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won't succeed with the iPhone,' adding, 'History speaks pretty loudly on that.' * * * Disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact [my note: it is equivalent to bubbles in economics -- no one, economists included -- was certain it was a bubble until it  pops]”)

* One should skip the first 30% of Lepore’s essay (because there she mostly talked about history, not economics) and start at the sentence: "The Innovator’s Dilemma” consists of a set of handpicked case studies, beginning with the disk-drive industry, which was the subject of Christensen’s doctoral thesis, in 1992.
* One may dismiss, as I initially did, Ms Lepore simply because she is not trained as an economist. But her observation was keen. Besides, Christensen based on his theory not on mathematics model but on case studies, which you and I, as well as Lepore, can read -- more or less like (business) history (Lepore’s specialty).
(B) Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History. Harvard University (History Department), undated
scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/home
("She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker")
(iii) Andrew A King and Baljir Baatartogtokh, How Useful Is the Theory of Disruptive Innovation?  MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2015.
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/artic ... ruptive-innovation/

(d) “As Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher, would have put it, Mr Christensen is a hedgehog (someone who knows one big thing) rather than a fox (who knows lots of little things) [which Isaiah Berlin considers better]: his hedgehog mind leads him to ignore or belittle companies or market forces that do not fit his template."

Isaiah Berlin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin
(1909-1997; born in Russian Empire (present-day Latvia) and died in Oxford, UK; section 2.4 "The Hedgehog and the Fox")

(e) “Mr Christensen argues that ‘real’ disruptive innovators succeed by attacking from the low end of the market. But Apple has invariably succeeded by aiming at the top end. Likewise, Netflix destroyed Blockbuster by attracting its core customers: people who were so enthusiastic about watching films that they would pay a monthly subscription to consume them in bulk. Both Netflix and Uber have prospered by dealing with the ‘pain points’ of core customers: in Netflix’s case, Blockbuster’s limited range and punishing late-return fees; and in Uber’s case, the manifold inefficiencies of the established taxi industry.”
(i) pain point (n): "(business) a problem or need a business or company aims to solve  <Traveling isn’t all fun and dandy – as with every other activity, there are pain points that need to be addressed?"
www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/pain-point
(ii) But why?  See Bruce Watson, Buzzword of the Week: Bringing the 'Pain Point.' Daily Finance, Mar 14, 2011.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011 ... he-week-bringing-t/

(f) “Don’t just follow the feet of Clay”
(i) Feet of Clay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feet_of_Clay
(may refer to "feet of clay, someone who appears strong or invincible, but who actually has a hidden weak point that could cause their demise")
(ii) The “clay” in the quotation is a double entendre (obsolete French -- formally: Middle and Old French -- for "double meaning" of a word).