The Inevitable Tedium of 'Disruption'

It has been nearly seventeen years since Clayton Christensen's doctoral thesis was published as The Innovator's Dilemma. Yet his book ranks hegemonically, consistently among the most important business books published in the last generation. And yet he sits upon the cover of the Harvard Magazine this summer, as though the business of disruption were just getting off the ground.

The innovator's dilemma, according to Christensen, is that success breeds failure. Invent a widget, find (or invent) your market, and you're golden . . . till you're not. Disrupt everything.

It would be easy at this point just to cite Judith Shulevitz's essay "Don't You Dare Say 'Disruptive,'" and be done with it. Jill Lepore diagnosed the problem as well.

The "Innovator's Dilemma" brand, ironically enough, has continued to chug along without much alteration at all. The prescription is disruption, and disruption is the prescription.

Indeed, innovation is evidently the only business model that doesn't actually need changing. After the smash success of The Innovator's Dilemma in 1997 (which itself recycled the author's 1992 dissertation), 1999 brought Innovation and the General Manager, 2000 brought Disruption, Disintegration, and the Dissipation of Differentiability.

The new millennium stuck to the same script: 2001's Getting the Innovation Job Done: Matching the Right New Product with the Right Market, 2003 The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, 2009 The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, 2011 The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out.

If changing the university's DNA isn't good enough, Christensen also coauthored the protoeugenic The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.

Let's not forget 2013's The Power of Everyday Missionaries: The What and How of Sharing the Gospel. Nothing breeds faith like success.

Over time the gospel of innovation has grown tiresome, and this summer's Harvard Magazine presents Christensen, dressed in the traditional garb of the modern businessman, alongside the title "Disruption Rules."

Disruption means innovation that actually screws stuff up.

One suspects it won't be long till "disruption" loses its luster, whereupon the disruptors will have a chance to corral another innocent English word into their machines of creative destruction.

Indeed, disruption is now a registered trademark of the brand management consulting firm TWBA.

And that will, in turn, create a business opportunity for rehashing all Christensen's earlier ideas under the new label. We can't be too surprised that the innovations of innovation keep making the same people rich.

Though the book titles all speak for themselves, Disruption, Disintegration, and the Dissipation of Differentiability carries particular weight. It sounds . . . unsettlingly postmodern, like the effort of an early-'90s lit crit graduate student writing a prospectus, title in hand, stabbing in the dark, hoping to make collateral damage out of some book minding its own business.

The dissipation of differentiability? Is that a commentary on Jean-François Lyotard's Le différend (1983)? Or does the emphasis on dissipation recall Deleuze's theory of the rhizome?

The point is reminiscent of the pro-disruption web site disruptive-thinking.com, whose (unoriginal) motto is "Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business." Oh? Think the unthinkable? Kind of like Thinking the Impossible?

Well, since the Sixties counterculture was at the root of postmodern theory, and since computer technology is the main locus of modern innovation, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the former shaped the latter. So much for the counterculture if it led nowhere but Silicon Valley.

And about those irrational postmodernists . . . if they were trying to diagnose the conditions of late-modern capitalism, and if late-modern capitalism keeps naively churning up the same themes—the unknown, the impossible, the unpresentable, differentiability, disruption—might it not be time to return to the maligned postmodernists for a diagnosis of our condition?

Today's disruptors are hardly better than the Vandals of yesteryear. Then as now, the only alternative to disruption is renaissance—a return among those who know, no matter whether the return goes unknown.