The Hedgehog of Disruption

As someone who has studied Clayton Christensen's work and found his analysis of technological changes in some industries to be very compelling, it has been somewhat disconcerting to watch over the years as he has attempted to fit every human endeavor into his theory of disruption. Christensen has managed to stand out even amongst the intellectual entrepreneurs in schools of business administration who are able to convert brilliant insights into cottage industries. So I was not completely surprised to read his recent musings on what he has learned, yet I struggled to understand how someone who had studied so widely, understood so many things, had only learned one thing - disruption. Then I realized that Clayton Christensen is a hedgehog.

In his 1953 essay The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, philosopher Isiah Berlin riffed on a line of Greek poetry (The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing) to draw out a distinction between those who pursue many ends, often only loosely related (foxes) and those who “relate everything to ... a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance” (hedgehogs). While Berlin created this dichotomy for the purposes of literary and philosophical criticism knowing that it only captured the extremes, it is a useful framework for understanding the phenomenon of Clayton Christensen.

In his essay, Christensen states that "innovation has become a buzzword" - well yes, anyone on LinkedIn or the internet has known that for many years. Yet he shows no inclination to wrestle with the buzzword he is directly responsible for - disruption - and the many ways in which he, following his initial research (which had great explanatory power for certain cases) has stretched it, applied it to any and every market (technology, medicine, education) as well as to societies as a whole. In the process he has created a "disruption machine" as his Harvard colleague Jill Lepore famously put it, fostering a cult of followers and making a great deal of money in the process. Nowhere in his reflections on what he has learned does he acknowledge the detailed studies by King and Baatartogtokh, and more broadly by Joshua Gans showing the limitations and confounding factors involved in applying the theory.

One might have hoped that Christensen might have taken the opportunity to reflect on the incredible experience of having crafted a theory that has become the subject of so much attention. Interestingly, in a blurb featured on the cover of Gans’ book, Christensen is quoted thus: “Even when Gans disagrees with my work, it has given me a chance to improve what the theory needs to say.” Some of the critiques might have caused him to pull back on the applicability of his theory to, well, everything. Instead, Christensen doubles down yet again. Ignoring reams of research showing that innovation flourishes in societies that are open and guided by the rule of law and property rights, he makes the claim that innovation itself creates healthy societies.

From there, Christensen moves on to defending the honor of the profession of management and giving advice on work-life balance, which all seems reasonable enough. However, he winds up the list of things he has “learned” with a non-sequitur: “God does not hire accountants.” Here, he describes how his faith leads him to believe in a higher power that will judge him based on how he lived his life. This is his belief, and there is no reason to think it is anything but heartfelt. But it is very strange to see a respected academic include a religious belief in a list of things that his 25 years of business research have taught him.

I suppose I should be thankful that he did not frame his belief in terms of the theory of disruption.