The genesis of today’s book centred on a question posed years ago to “disruptive technologies” coauthor Clayton Christensen: where do disruptive business models come from? Christensen’s best-selling books, The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, conveyed important insight into the characteristics of disruptive technologies, business models, and companies.
Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn’s “Disrupting Class” is an unsettling title for a book about the schooling process.
The title conveys multiple meanings.
The principal message is that disruption can usefully frame why schools have struggled to improve and how to solve these problems.
The Innovator’s Solution summarises a set of theories that can guide managers who need to grow new businesses with predictable success—to become the disruptors rather than the disruptees—and ultimately kill the well-run, established competitors. To succeed predictably, disruptors must be good theorists. As they shape their growth business to be disruptive, they must align every critical process and decision to fit the disruptive circumstance.
“I Don’t Have an Opinion, the Theory Has an Opinion” – Clayton Christensen, inoculating value attribution bias by using the lens of theory.
The paper I wanted to share today aims to provide a common language about the research process that helps management scholars spend less time defending the style of research they have chosen and build more effectively on each other’s work.
I felt this series on Clayton Christensen’s work and theories would be incomplete without this episode.
It is a great pleasure to welcome the co-author of that paper and a person who has built on this work considerably, Paul Carlile.
Using the rational, analytical investment processes that most well-managed companies have developed, it is nearly impossible to build a logical case for diverting resources from known customer needs in established markets to markets and customers that seem insignificant or do not yet exist.
Clark G. Gilbert on Clayton Christensen, “Dual Transformation” and “From Resource Allocation to Strategy”
Discovery-Driven Planning with Rita Gunther McGrath The Clayton Christensen Tribute
As Clayton Christensen reiterated throughout his work, capable managers do not become incapable overnight; they act in what they believe is in the best interests of the organisation they serve. For the executives in Western Union, there was simply no way they could have anticipated that the telephone would ever get good enough to be a competitive threat. As the great innovator Buckminster Fuller said, “There is nothing in the caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly.”Â
Joseph L. Bower is the father of Resource Allocation theory included in his 1970 groundbreaking book, Managing the Resource Allocation Process.
He has been a leader in general management at Harvard Business School for over 5 decades where he is the Donald K. David Professor Emeritus.
He was Clayton Christensen’s doctoral thesis adviser and worked with Clay to develop and stress test his theories.
He is with us today to recognise his friend and revisit that famous 1995 article,
“Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave” that preceded the Innovator’s Dilemma
In a way this episode is a prequel to part one.
It is a great honour to welcome for the hour or Bower: Professor Joseph L. Bower