The Industrialized Revolution

The reward of thinking according to circumstances, Christensen says, is that "things get predictable." And predictability is essential. After bad management, unpredictability is the most universal explanation for failing to create new growth. Even the best managers and most sophisticated thinkers start with the assumption that innovation is a mysterious black box. Strategies from "fail faster to succeed sooner" to "let 1,000 flowers bloom" to sweeping exhortations to challenge orthodoxy generally aim to improve the odds a bit in what's seen as a crapshoot.

Unlike the fire-breathing, fist-pounding champions of innovation who swelled the ranks of management thinkers in the 1990s, Christensen is less of an advocate of innovation than a dispassionate student of it. His first observation is that innovation management today is where quality management was 20 years ago, when he worked in manufacturing. Quality was managed in track-and-tweak mode. Engineers used statistical-process-control charts to measure deviations from the norm and inspected machines that veered beyond the set tolerances. "The assumption was that there was just randomness in manufacturing and the solutions were about dealing with the alleged randomness in as efficient a way as possible," he says. Then the Japanese quality vanguard stepped in to ask, Doesn't every deviation have to have a cause? It just looks random because we don't know the cause. It was a straight line from that question to Six Sigma quality.

Most of today's strategies for managing innovation are similarly structured to cope with randomness and unpredictability. That was fine until Christensen came along with his question, Doesn't every failure have a cause? In his model, individuals may appear unpredictable, but the forces that act on them as they shape an idea into a new growth business are not. Those forces include "predictable growth pathologies," or the tendency of established companies to cram potentially disruptive innovations into an existing business model (for example, the major carmakers' attempts to build electric vehicles good enough to compete with gasoline vehicles in established markets instead of building simpler, cheaper cars for, say, urban drivers who need them for shorter trips). Once you know what those pathologies are, "the process of creating successful innovations itself is not inherently as out of control or unpredictable as it's seemed," says Christensen.

Just ask Andy Grove. The Intel chairman beat Christensen to market with his paranoia principle in 1996, but his company was primed for disruption when Christensen came calling the next year. During a series of seminars with nearly 2,000 senior managers, Grove pounced on Christensen's slide that illustrated how steel mini mills, starting with a toehold in the low-end reinforcing-bar ("rebar") market, rapidly stole 40% of the business from the industry leaders--a classic disruptive innovation. Rebar quickly became code inside Intel for attacking the long-ignored, low-cost personal computing market. The result: The hugely successful lower-performance Celeron chip. Even more important, says Grove, was the mind shift in the organization. "The effect of the model isn't that it gave us any answers," he told Christensen," but it gave us a common language and a common way to frame the problem so that we could reach consensus around a counterintuitive course of action."

That endorsement fortified Christensen's resolve to change the world with better thinking. "I thought if you brought good theory to smart people, then they aren't condemned to repeating the mistakes of the past," he says.

Christensen's ultimate mission is to empower a legion of leaders not just to shepherd a single disruptive innovation but to become serial disruptors. He admits it has never been done before. "Many successful companies have disrupted once. A few, including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Kodak, and Intuit have disrupted several times. But as far as I know, no company has been able to build an engine of disruptive growth and keep it running and running." That's a different and more daunting task than the average success manual prescribes. "It's actually a fun thought," says Christensen, "that an average person like me or you can go in and be a really successful innovator."

The first Joe Innovator to take the plunge is Christensen himself. The project: Disrupt the McKinseys of the world. Along with some former Harvard Business School students, Christensen has founded an upstart consulting firm called Innosight. With McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain, and Monitor crowded together in the stratosphere of multi-million-dollar projects for global 1,000 corporations, Christensen sees "a vacuum in strategy in the low land." He and his colleagues have created a relatively cheap ($150,000 to $350,000), significantly faster, "good enough" process for developing a growth business--an idea "that is very disruptive to the big consulting firms." His theory predicts it will work. McKinsey may have other ideas.