

The Coming Disruption - socialmediaking
http://blogs.forbes.com/michaelellsberg/2011/05/10/teen-knowledge-work/

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6ren
> A disruptive innovation occurs when long-standing assumptions in a
> marketplace are tested and successfully challenged by upstarts.

A disruption innovation is a new way of doing things, often based on
technology (but can be a different business model), that at first is not good
enough for mainstream users. So it is no threat to incumbents, and no
competitive response is provoked. But it is good enough for some other users
and usages, and it can gradually improve in this safe backwater... until one
day, it is good enough for mainstream users - but it also has some other
benefits (that appealed to those other users), and so, suddenly, they switch.
This is a disruption.

The difficulty for incumbents is that (up til then), their customers didn't
want it. They might even have tried to force it on their customers, but with
no response. Because good management will listen to customers, and try to
serve them, it makes it even harder for them to deal with approaching
disruptions, even if they see them clearly.

Another problem is that while incumbents may keep on improving their product
(so it is still clearly, overwhelmingly superior to the disruption), the key
to the effect is that their product has become more than good enough. So it
doesn't matter that it's better it's like offering ever more water to a man
who was thirsty, but is now full.

Note that there are many parts to this scenario, and a candidate innovation
might fall down at many points - it might not be possible to improve it enough
for mainstream users; there might be a way for incumbents to co-opt it; a
great company can sometimes disrupt themselves (cannibalizing their own
sales); yet another disruption might improve enough before this one did, etc.

Two big take-homes for me:

\- to be aware of what people want, not just making better widgets.

\- making a product that some people want, but that is not yet perfect and not
yet ideal for them, is a _good_ thing.

~~~
hga
To reify this, my favorite example from _The Innovator's Dilemma_ :

After WWII hydraulic excavators were introduced to the market. They could only
move a quarter of a cubic yard at a time, the sort of work that had previously
been done by men with shovels. This nicely fit with the explosion of suburbs
where these excavators could efficiently dig small trenches for water and
sewer access.

The steam shovel companies ignored this, catering to their markets for bigger
trenches for main water and sewer pipes and larger scale excavation (e.g.
digging out foundations).

The companies making hydraulic excavators steadily improved, to the points
where they could handle the above applications. At those points they _quickly_
wiped out their entrenched steam shovel competitors, for they didn't have
chains that could snap and lash back at the operator.

For the general reasons mentioned by the parent posting, these competitors
woke up to the threat way too late, didn't have the expertise necessary to
quickly compete and I'm pretty sure most/all that tried ran out of money
before they could make the transition. One of the deadly things about
disruptive innovation is that they can crater your revenues faster than your
corporate culture can respond.

ADDED:

All that said, after reading the article, while the author does not clearly
make the case, I get the feeling that "Teen Knowledge Work" _as enabled by the
Internet_ is indeed something like a disruptive innovation.

The Internet has _massively_ leveraged would be and current "knowledge
workers". Let's look at our ability to self-educate: previously, it was hard
to be an autodidact if for no other reason than it was hard to find out the
books you ought to read. Now that meta-information is easily available, in on-
line course book lists, Amazon.com reviews, Wikipedia articles and of course
many less formal venues.

With these resources, not a whole lot of cash (and things like forums where
one can questions) the self-directed self-disciplined learner can get a pretty
good education. It won't equal the one you can get from rubbing shoulder with
a few thousand of the best and brightest at MIT or an IIT, but I suspect it's
enough to start a serious knowledge worker career.

So to get back to the disruptive innovation concept, teens who previously
(with rare exceptions) just couldn't come up to speed before they exited their
teen/early 20s years, who were able to do lower quality "knowledge work", are
now able to do much higher quality knowledge work.

(One detail that you need to take into consideration of all this is how the
college degree has replace the now worthless high school degree and now
illegal recruiting testing. And now things like a portfolio of accomplishments
presented on the Internet can replace the college degree as a signal.)

~~~
6ren
The internet is definitely disrupting education; especially some organizations
that use it (Christensen has a chapter about it in _Seeing What's Next_ , and
in fact a whole other book _Disrupting Class_ , specific to it
<http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books.html> \- I've read the former).

You make an interesting point: as education has become more widely available,
it's lost its quality as a signal because everyone goes there; and it does
appear that quality has gone down (I guess it must, if you cater for
everyone). Odd: it's usually the disruptions that go down-market, targeting
non-consumption. One can see the net as an extension of this
downward/expanding trend of education.

But I do think it's an extremely rare person - maybe just as rare as
autodidacts of years past - who has the self-discipline/interest and wisdom to
use these resources. It's not easy (in fact, my PhD supervisor liked to say
that the purpose of a PhD was to enable you to learn how to learn - I wouldn't
go that far, and indeed haven't completed). Most people look at videos of cats
online - a sort of downmarket TV.

\---

BTW: If you're interested in reading Christensen's other books... they are co-
authored, and he's also running a consulting business. And sadly it shows. His
first book was beautifully written, forming a compelling and inspirational
narrative (really), and rigorously supported by data. His later ones aren't.
They are written like a cross between undigested research paper (but without
data or support) and an overly casual self-help business book. I suppose it's
too much to expect even of someone as brilliant as Christensen, a Rhodes
Scholar, to do the equivalent of a PhD for each of his books (his first one
was based on his PhD). They have interesting ideas, but they are complex and
not supported, leaving me with the sense that they little more reliable than
plausible ideas. Actually, they are pretty good, but just irritating,
disappointing and confusing.

He's refined terminology for his theory (e.g. target non-consumption;
asymmetrical motivation between poor entrants and rich incumbents) which I
think is good. He also relates it back to the basics, of succeeding by meeting
customer needs/wants, and generalizes. It's a bit insular, self-indulgent and
inward looking, focusing on his theory instead of data in the world.
Solipsistic, in a wordy word.

~~~
hga
You're right, in that a bachelor's degree per se no longer means what it did,
but my point about high school diplomas is that what most everyone got, as of
say the Silent Generation (my parents'), used to mean quite a lot. However, by
or sometime after say 1955 when _Why Johnny Can't Read_ was published it
apparently wasn't even a guarantee of functional reading (I wouldn't directly
know, having grown up in a city that _Reader's Digest_ reported on a year or
two later with the title "Why Johnny Can Read In Joplin").

Ny point here is that "everybody goes there" wasn't to the best I can tell a
factor in the degradation of the high school diploma. I'm pretty sure the
expansion of colleges and universities due to the G.I. Bill etc. didn't result
in too much of a loss in higher education, that seemed to arrive in the
cultural '60s (due to draft deferments and the general Zeitgeist) and very few
if any colleges avoided some grade inflation and watering down of the
curriculum or its rigor (not even MIT).

Anyway, I don't see these formal educational developments really fitting into
the Christensen framework, it's not like the real world where an excavator or
a disk drive must perform at some minimal level to get the job done.

\---

Thanks for the warnings on the subsequent books, which I haven't read. The
first is indeed a jewel, and thanks to my background I could tell that his
primary data set on disk drives was spot on, as seemed to be his conclusions.
I'll be careful if I decide to go back to the well.

(Have to run, tornado warning....)

~~~
hga
Make that a provisional EF4 in Joplin, 116 confirmed dead so far, hundreds
injured. 2,000 structures damaged, including my apartment building and
apartment.

------
nazgulnarsil
Oh please. The overwhelming urge to label everything a movement is ridiculous.
The internet is allowing intelligent young people to start building value
without the years of network building. Of course some of them will be
standouts.

~~~
MichaelEllsberg
I agree with you that many journalists are perhaps a bit quick on the draw to
label any little murmur a "movement" or "trend." However, I do believe that
the phenomenon of young people questioning formal higher education and
striking out on their own---while certainly not at critical mass yet---will
truly quality as a true trend/movement to watch in the coming years.

There are just too many structural factors coming together at once:
skyrocketing tuition costs; combined with a lackluster economy; combined with
unsustainable levels of indebtedness compared to starting salaries; combined
with cheap and easy ways to educate yourself on the Net; combined with a
cultural trend towards young CEOs (many of whom are dropouts) becoming the new
"rock stars"; combined with dramatically lower start-up costs for
entrepreneurialism, which usually doesn't require formal credentials; combined
with a "red ocean" effect in the oversaturation of BAs on the job market---all
of these are pointing to what I think is likely to be a groundswell of young
people questioning formal higher education in the next 3-5 years.

Watch this space. I believe it will be an absolutely undeniable movement
within a few years.

(Author of the article you are critiquing.)

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michaelchisari
_Become a part of the disruptive generation creating workable, realistic self-
employment on the free-agent knowledge market._

I really, really don't even know how to respond to this article. I guess the
biggest issue, beyond the over-use of vague buzzwords, is that it picks at
it's central example someone who doesn't seem to have really made any
considerable accomplishments or achieved any tangible success.

~~~
MichaelEllsberg
I'd say it's a bit harsh to say Dale Stephens hasn't achieved "any tangible
success," Michael. He supports himself fully as a professional public speaker,
at age 19, and he does so without being "famous" (movie star, athlete,
musician, etc.)

Tens of thousands of professional speakers, many into their adulthood, would
kill to have the professional life he has. Indeed, as someone who supports
himself fully as a freelancer, I'd say that's already a level of success that
many adults seeking to strike out on their own dream of.

True, he's not a gazillionaire, but I specifically chose to write about him
for that reason. Had I written about, say, the usual suspects when giving
examples of successful young people without college degrees (Mark Zuckerberg,
etc), someone else might have said, "But they're the outliers! Average kids
can't expect to be like them!" He has reached a level of success which I
believe is impressive for his age, and which many adults would envy.

BTW, he was just named one of the Thiel Fellows, and was chosen as one of 24,
among 800 applicants, to win $100,000. I'd say that's a pretty impressive
accomplishment, compared to what many 19 years have accomplished so far.

(I'm the author of the article you're critiquing here.)

------
slyall
I wonder if a degree will go the way of some of the Industry Certs like CCNA
and MCSE. 10-15 years ago the only people who got those were people who were
serious about IT and often had been working on those platforms for years.

Then the dot-com boom happened and people just bought study guides to get the
certs and you got complaints about people with the certs who didn't know what
they were doing.

2 results of that are that the certs got harder and employers started ignoring
them since they were not a good predictor of job performance.

Similarly with a degree, 40 years ago a degree meant you were top 10% and got
you on the management track (or equivalent).

These days it is a much weaker signal, you're probably above average but maybe
only a little bit. The top 20% of degree-less people probably beats out the
bottom 20% of those with degrees.

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drats
The most interesting link is from the guy's uncollege page regarding the
academic performance of homeschooled children.[1]

[1]<http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/200908100.asp>

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kevin_morrill
Forbes = linkbait

