Sidewalk

Christensen has shown that over and over again, it is the people we didn't see that knock us out of the market if we happen to be the real big cheese in town.  Contrary to popular opinion not everything that is considered disruptive is disruptive innovation - it is just plain old DISRUPTIVE.

Now we know from Clayton's research that it is the little guy or gal we underestimated and ignored, the one whose work we deemed unprofitable and not worth fighting against that leads the big and might to do the right thing and in doing the right thing, do the absolute wrong thing.

Road rage at my age is a great way of erasing important years on my pathway.  I can't get mixed up in the daily social media dust-up because I know there is another one just waiting around the corner.  Those that create disruptive innovations that are INNOVATIONS - don't set out to create disruption - they are so quietly focused on flying under the radar - that they are too busy to rage.Midnight Cowboy happens to be one of my two all time favourite movies, the other being Good Will Hunting.  

At no point in that definition is the word

EQUANIMITY

which to me is where everyone is losing their heads but we choose to keep ours not lower or not higher but in a state of continuous flow.  It is really difficult to think if we are trying to engage our own walk on the sidewalk of learning and people in cars don't see us.  At the same time if our purpose is true and it is learning which is the end goal of our pathway, then if we do get upset, it is a learning to get back to equanimity but incorporate the learning within that.

There is a lot of rage in the political sphere, there has been a steady escalation each and every election cycle and it gets more intense.  Draw a graph in this conflict and the trajectory is not a good one, one which in the past has been called civil war.  Those that are heralded for disruptive innovation never were in the business of fighting against the big dogs - they maintained their focus and it is the big dogs that ended up chasing their own tail. 

Yet when we get reactive in the 21st Century, we are no longer using media to focus on our own learning journey but turning it into a battle against something.  That is the way things were done in the 60's and that created counter-culture.  Disruptive Innovation is something that has become more and more identified in the 21st Century to question how we see things and more importantly the dangers of being right. 

If we understand what Clayton Christensen has studied then he points out that managers were doing the right thing for the market conditions they were in, and that is why he called this decision in face of a disruptive innovator - the Innovators Dilemma.  Now if we don't change the way we see things and continue in the same way expecting different results - then in the case of the political rage, the next election cycle in 2020 is not one that is worth looking forward and maybe the movie Network was more prescient about this than they ever knew in that famous scene where Peter Finch plays "Howard Beale".  Arrogance is how we choose to react to it.