Thanks, Robert, for an very interesting and thoughtful contribution to this thread. I sit with Dave West every Friday, so I would have had to be more brain-dead than I actually am not to anticipate that my question might be taken politically. It’s all good. And many of the same issues apply.
One of those issues is the “bring on the comet” vs “feed the dinosaur” argument. To return to my original question, I am still doubtful that an entrepreneur should offer his company up as a comet unless he has a mammal in waiting. NIck Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Robert Wall Sent: Friday, October 21, 2016 4:20 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] enablors vs disruptors So, perhaps, rather than thinking of enablers and disrupters as alternative predicate adjectives describing new technological innovations brought to market, let's think of the former as the subject of a simple sentence with a prepositional phrase and the latter as the object of the same sentence, such as "The enabler brought disruption to the existing market." This connotes more of a cause and effect relationship between the words; so they are coupled and not opposed as they would be comparing them as separate predicate adjectives. As it turns out, as far as I can remember, in a market strategy aimed at being disruptive in, say, a start-up seeking venture capital to target and break through certain established barriers to entry set up as defenses against disruption--in a way reminiscent of what the trebuchet brought to existing castle walls in the Middle Ages--the enabler is much more than the technology per se (i.e., the trebuchet) ... as Eric Charles has proffered in his strategy for a non-technology start-up. The enabler must also include the strategy itself--entry and exit--an organization, leadership, a delivery system, ideology and policy development, fundraising, people, closed-loop feedback systems with timely corrective action, etc. Disruption is not guaranteed by just a good technological idea. Successful big businesses--those worth disrupting--most always have built-in defenses against disruptions. Timing is also important to thwart a competent counter attack. To be sure, disruption--that is, market share usurpation--can come in various degrees. There's Amazon's "trebuchet" to the brick and mortar businesses ... but there are still many surviving bookstores like Collective Works and Op Cit. So scale or size--like with species surviving an extinction event disruption--is a form of defense like it wasn't when Tower Records got too big to respond to the Amazon or Apple disruptions. And then there are those "boutique" challenges, like Five Guys, to the seemingly impenetrable hamburger delivery businesses represented by the Big Three. In this case, there is no real new technology at the core, but just a strategy to appeal to a different segment of the market not being addressed well enough to repel a niche-level disruption ... a wood chipper instead of a trebuchet, say. Like many on this thread have done already, the analysis brought by Nick has been immediately analogized to the current political spectrum with concrete dump trucks and jackhammers even. I like this direction, especially for the 2016 election, which should motivate us all to contemplate how to cause a disruption in the system that has, IMHO, delivered to us the two worst candidates for POTUS in recent memory ... and mine goes back all the way to Eisenhower and Stevenson ... I did like Ike ... even if I was just a kid then traveling with my parents on the nascent interstate highway infrastructure he brought to the transportation marketplace ... disruptive? Ask the Holiday Inns, Howard Johnsons, etc. that replaced the mom and pops. Electorally, it looks like 2016 is a bust, but can we do anything for 20120? How do we disrupt the market for political leadership? In that respect, I found this article brought to us by The Daily Beast to be quite thought-provoking: "Time To Take a Silicon Valley Hammer To the Two-Party Duopoly <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/11/both-parties-stink-let-s-build-a-new-american-politics-2-0.html> (9-10-2016)." Yeah, it could even be a jackhammer. 😊 What the author brings is a reformation of the previous sentence I brought at the start of this post, such as "The Citizens' Party brought disruption to the market for political leadership ." He says, "Let's disrupt the Democratic and Republican parties the way Uber’s eviscerated the taxi business." "I want us to come together to build this Citizens’ Party to enable the broad range of Americans who fall under the fat part of the bell curve in our political thinking and attitudes—those of us who find the Democrats’ socialism-fueled platform as repugnant as we find the Republicans’ nativist one—to identify and nurture candidates and raise funds and build organizations that reflect our non-outlier beliefs about how our country should work." "If we ’re going to disrupt this market for political leadership—the market the two parties collude to control in a way no Justice Department would ever allow in any other context—we’re going to need to bring expertise from the technology, political, policy, legal, communications, and fundraising industries and communities into the swarm and make them all buzz together." 😎 That's much more to bring than just a technology product to enable the disruption. The "castle walls" of the existing Duopoly are nearly seventeen decades old and heavily fortified and those insiders are very good at controlling the existing zeitgeist (i.e., the marketplace of ideas). Moreover, there is no profit motive here, just a better chance a more reliable political leadership delivery system. I dunno, in a way, this can be sold as the averting of another kind of extinction event: a self-made one. Hmmm. I am not sure that Nick anticipated his thread to be taken in this direction and hope that I haven disrupted his intended train of thought too much. 🤔😊 Cheers. On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 12:11 PM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com <mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com> > wrote: The concrete truck also facilitates a new ecosystem. The old ecosystem (say, coal mining, humans building mass-produced machines with their hands) won't last much longer anyway. The old ecosystem is like a lake with out-of-control toxic algae growth. -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com <mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith Sent: Friday, October 21, 2016 11:55 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] enablors vs disruptors > Well, there's the concrete truck and then there's the jackhammer. > if these are the subjects, what are the objects? A concrete truck enables the paving of the universe but disrupts the ecosystem while the jackhammer presumably/roughly does just the opposite. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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