S-curves

Last night I looked at Rita McGrath’s weekly podcast. This week’s podcast presented “Jumping a new “S” Curve” on July 17, 2020 in McGrath & Whitney Johnson Fireside Chat Full Session.

Johnson worked with Clayton Christensen. She applies his conceptualization of disruption to herself. She wants the individual employee to disrupt to disrupt themselves.

I had to Google Whitney Johnson’s S-curves. The list of hits was short. One of the hits was a link to McKinsey. Foster was a director at McKinsey. Foster wrote the first book on disruption. That book was written back at the dawn of the internet. Foster saw disruption as an accidental side effect. Christensen saw disruption as something that could be done deliberately.

HBJ’s claim that Christensen was first author of disruption was a bit much given that Christenen cites Foster in Inventor’s Dilemma. Christensen eventually claimed that no S-curve was necessary. Wikipedia published that claim at some point in the past. I was interested in discontinuous innovation long before Foster. Various disruption pushing professors surrounding Christensen have tended to replace discontinuous innovation with disruption, but disruption is not about invention, or S-curves, no discontinuities. In fact, Christensen’s disruption is about a point in the technology adoption lifecycle that is continuous in regards to the carried content.

As a result disruptive innovation has come to replace discontinuous innovation. One thing got lost, the technology adoption lifecycle. One disruptor captured a billion dollars in investor money by claiming disruption. This long before it actually disrupted anything. The VCs are funding predatory pricing in the hopes of capturing a monopoly position. Still, the end of the technology adoption lifecycle is closing the window on the category. The category will die before the justice department gets involved.

Disruption is about the business model. Disruption is not about invention, or the innovation.

Another discussion on the Fireside Chat this morning is how managers want to be designers. Design thinking is all the rage. B-schools created design thinking. Yes, some continuous innovation. Enjoy, be happy. The category is dying. We exit that business before disruption happens to us. Facing disruption, we must innovate discontinuously in an ongoing manner.

These two Fireside Chat discussions leave us with managers that to innovate without inventors or designers. Oh, well.