Hi everyone, welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I'm Sonal Choxy, and today we have as a guest on the pod,

Michael Rayner, who's a director at Deloitte Services, and a co-author on one of the seminal books

on disruption with Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Solution.

Rayner also later wrote a book called The Innovators Manifesto, which is one of the very few works

out there that actually test the predictive power of

disruption theory. We invited Rainer on the podcast today, since he, Clayton Christensen, and

Rory McDonald have a new paper coming out this December in Harvard Business Review, defining what

disruption theory is and what it isn't. Welcome, Michael. Thanks. It's great to be here.

Thank you for coming. So actually, why don't we just jump right in and let's just start with talking about what disruption is.

And I think it's come top of mind because there's been a lot of articles written in the last year that sort of slam it.

And to be clear, I think people are slamming both the word, because it is very overused. And I think part of it is also slamming the theory, which is what we're talking about here, disruption the theory. Yeah, I mean, as I read it, I'd say it's even more than part of it. There have been a couple of critiques that have come out. There was a piece just over a year ago in The New Yorker that was very pointedly about Clayton and disruption theory. There's a piece come out recently in the New Yorker that was very pointedly about Clayton and disruption theory.

There's a piece come out recently in the Sloan Management Review that's similarly sort of an attempt to look at the theory and say,

so here's where it goes too far, where it makes mistakes, where it – and I think that's important, actually.

I mean, that's how we progress, right? Constantly saying we got it right the first time doesn't take you anywhere new.

Conceptually, at least, it's easy to, it's easy to embrace that kind of give and take, that kind of discussion.

Yeah, no, I think that's great. What was the gist of the critiques? I mean, I agree that conceptually it's

important to have that kind of, but what were people sort of slamming about the theory?

Yeah, it's, I guess in the first instance, they were going after a phenomenon that I think is

definitely something worth trying to, I'll say combat at the risk of overstating the case,

which is that the term disruption, I think,

has come to be used far too frequently with far too little precision.

Right.

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