I haven't read Christensen's books, but the story Jill Lepore tells in that article sounds totally credible. Disruptive innovation is a theory of history. Give

I haven't read Christensen's books, but the story Jill Lepore tells in that article sounds totally credible. Disruptive innovation is a theory of history. Given any historical event with winners and losers, it reframes it as a contest between innovator and non-innovator with a preordained outcome. Microsoft succeeded and Xerox failed because PCs were the inevitable future, which Microsoft embraced and Xerox denied. Xerox should have seen that the PC was inevitable and planned accordingly, the theory says. However, there is a problem when trying to apply the theory in real time, as Lepore points out: "Disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact." She explains the theory's circularity: "Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But... advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation. ... When an established company succeeds, that’s only because it hasn’t yet failed. And, when any of these things happen, all of them are only further evidence of disruption." It works well only in retrospect, and it can't be disproven. Like all theories of history, it only explains things that have already happened.