A friend of mine told me she wanted to find and read an article in the New Yorker. It was the May edition, last month, so it might be hard to find a hard copy. She Googled it, and showed me the cover. It was a play of Magritte's surrealist faceless businessman. I was instantly interested. Surrealist imagery and style that resonates very strongly with me, as you can tell by my avatar. I quickly noted, "We don't need to find a hard copy. I'm can just download it onto the iPad."
There's an app for that...
I was told the article was about "disruptive innovation", which of course also immediately sparked my interest. First the cover I loved, and now an intellectually titillating subject like "disruptive innovation" for the article? Disruptive innovation strikes right to the core of my two great passions, Science and Art. I wanted to find and read the article as well. My attention had been captured.
The article was: "When Giants Fail: What Business has Learned from Clayton Christensen"
Remind me to look into his books. His ideas about the steel mill still hold value in the theory they construct, but "disruptions" are far more complicated now than the steel mill analogy can define. I think of it as derivatives being a disruption on Wall Street... the steel mill analogy helps get the idea across, like the Bohr model of the atom, but it's only where you start your understanding, it does not account for the quantum mechanics involved and is thus difficult to produce answers from, directly.
The article was nice profile of him. Christensen is a very interesting person, with a very good story and observation. It got me thinking. First, "disruption" is always relative to the disrupted. Not everyone is disrupted, by every disruption, in fact sometimes people are better off from disruption, it is only the bottom line that is not. Sometimes the bottom line is far better off with the disruption, it is the consumer, their health, or another specific industry that is disrupted -- starved to death and obliterated. Manufactured food is disruptive to organic farming. Rome was disruptive to Hellenism. Modernism -- most explicitly in architecture, but also intellectually -- was disruptive to everything that came before it. But...
Postmodernism is "disruptive innovation". Postmodernism is disruptive innovation on Modernism. It's sound onto the silent film biz, 3-D on Blockbuster filmmaking. Postmodernism is that slight mutation of an idea or form that triggers a dramatic shift in the environment in which it operates. When I think of disruptive innovation, I think of "Reality TV" -- disruptive innovation on traditional scripted programing. It's an inferior technology overtaking a better one by numbers or force; market force. It's what the invention of mp3s did to the Record Industry. Napster brought an industry, that was over 100 years old, to it's knees in about one year's time. Disruptions come fast and strong in Postmodernism. Like hurricanes out of the clear blue sky, "disruptions" sweep in and the operating landscape is changed. Facebook disrupted Myspace to death, but only distracted Google and Apple into paying attention. Apple disrupted music, movies, books, cell-phones, computers... Silicon Valley is disrupting Hollywood, but also helping it...
Digital media is disrupting publishing, but it is also helping it. This is when I realized to point of the article, and the idea. Creating (your own) disruptions, ones that can help (you), is the name of the game. Disruption can be a good thing, it doesn't have to be a bad thing, so long as you know how to use it.
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I've been a fan of the New Yorker for a long time. It's important to support good writers and organizations that nurture them. "Buy writing content", I thought to myself. Support the digital publishing model! So, I downloaded the app and bought the magazine. I wanted it enough to buy it, rare for me. No need to call or drive around looking for it. Instant readability at a nominal fee, really helped me.
"What an age this is..."
