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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

I'm talking today with Max Wessel, a fellow at the Forum for Growth and Innovation,

and a senior researcher at Harvard Business School.

He's the author with Clay Christensen of the HBO article Surviving Disruption.

He also blogs regularly for HPR.org. So Max, tell us what the problem you're really trying

to solve with this piece is.

Sure, surviving disruption actually came from a hypothetical.

I was walking down the street talking with a friend, a colleague at Harvard about kind of

of the future of, in fact, the future of retail. And we're both heavy technologists and we tend to embrace

any new buying format, any mobile purchasing

as soon as anything is available in app form on our phones.

We were quick to adopt e-commerce in the era of the web browser.

And we were walking down the street and talking about the significance of

disruption when I kind of posed the question well what do you think is going to happen

when Amazon puts all of these mom- pop stores or local chains out of business.

Because I can't imagine looking down the side of the road and seeing no storefronts.

And that was really the first time the two of us had taken the perspective of the

incumbents view. You know, there are things that the incumbent companies in the world,

...