FT’s John Kay weighs in on the Clayton Christensen vs. Jill
Lepore Debate:
“Few people can have
had experience of more than a small number of industries and companies. But far
more is expected of consultants, professors and corporate saviours. The
conventional practice of the business guru turns personal experience into
panacea. The observation that some companies have succeeded by disrupting their
industries, while others have failed because their business was disrupted, is
reduced to the facile slogan “disrupt!”. The observation of a tendency – that
large companies struggle with discontinuous change – is translated into a
universal law. But few generalisations in business carry the wide-ranging
validity of the laws of physics.”
See earlier post on the topic here: