“Everybody talks about disruption now,” George Gilder, a technology writer and onetime business partner of Christensen’s, says. “Clayton inserted that word in the mind of every C.E.O. in technology. Everywhere you go, people explain that they’re disrupting this or disrupting that. Every big company now tries to disrupt itself all the time, and it’s not clear to me that it’s always a good thing—companies that have a good business may prematurely disinvest from it because they see this inexorable process that Clayton describes.”
“His ideas are pervasive,” Paul Steinberg, the chief technology officer of Motorola Solutions, says. “It doesn’t matter what industry, it’s almost like a universal law. I’ve had ideas of my own squished for just the reason he said they would be, so now that I’m in a higher position I realize there has to be a way of incubating those ideas or the company will perish. He scared the crap out of me.”
Actual photograph of an actual Mormon baptism of an actual convert.
