Tuck Knowledge in Practice Podcast: Epic Disruptions throughout History

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Scott Anthony: You know, 1620 Sir Francis Bacon observed that there had been three technologies in history where you basically draw a line before and after. So there was before and there was after. And those were two very different worlds. Gunpowder was one of them. The printing press was one of them. The compass was one of them. And that's exactly what a disruption does. You can see the clear before you can see the clear after. Now there's a persistent pattern in the middle. In between those two is really messy. And the thing that I think is interesting right now is we're in the middle of a lot of things like this generative AI, additive manufacturing, cryptocurrency lab grown, the list goes on and on, and we're not sure exactly how things are going to play out. And I'd argue that history can be a really helpful guide to help you think through it.

[Podcast introduction and music]

Kirk Kardashian: Hey everyone, this is Kirk Kardashian and you're listening to Knowledge and Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. In this podcast, we talk with tuck professors about their research and teaching and the story behind their curiosity. Today on the show, I'm talking with Scott Anthony, a clinical professor of business administration at tuck. Scott has a new book coming out called Epic Disruptions 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World. It will be published in September by Harvard Business Review Press. The book is a fascinating historical tour of disruptive innovations, from gunpowder and the printing press to Pampers and the iPhone. Along the way, Scott explains disruptive theory, the influence of Clayton Christensen, and the lessons we can learn from disruption about creativity and strategy. Scott's research and teaching focus on the adaptive challenges of disruptive change. He teaches the courses Leading Disruptive Change, Horizon Scanning and AI and Consultative Decision Making to MBA students, and he teaches in the Advanced Management Program in Tuck. Executive education. The author of nine books about innovation. Scott previously spent more than 20 years at Insite, a growth strategy consultancy founded by Clayton Christensen, where he served as Innosight’s elected managing partner from 2012 to 2018. He has lived in the United Kingdom in Singapore, held board roles at public and private companies, giving keynote addresses on six continents, and worked with CEOs at numerous global organizations. Thinkers 50 named him the world's ninth most influential thinker in 2023, and the world's leading innovative thinker in 2017. Well, Scott Anthony, welcome to Knowledge and Practice. Thanks for being here.

Scott Anthony: Kirk. I am thrilled to be with you today.

Kirk Kardashian: It's a real honor. And we're talking today about your new book, which is titled Epic Disruptions 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World, which is being published in September by Harvard Business Review Press. So congrats on the new book. That's exciting.

Scott Anthony: Thank you very much. I'm excited about I actually have a physical copy, which doesn't mean too much since we're doing an audio interview, but I've got one with me. It's the pre-release version of the book, and it's just always exciting to see it in physical form. It becomes real when you can actually pick it up and touch it.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, yeah, I remember that moment with my book and it is, it's when everything kind of becomes real. It's great. Congratulations. Um, so because the, the title of your book has two terms that I think have that have been used a lot recently. Um, I think it'll be fun and helpful to really kind of dig into those definitions. Right. So, you know, you've got disruption and innovation. Um, so how do you like to define those terms in the context of your book? Um, give us sort of like a, you know, a standard that we want to use going forward in the conversation.

Scott Anthony: Yeah, it's a really important thing because, you know, often you will have people use these words and not put any definition around it, and then they start talking past each other because people mean really different things with them. So let me start with innovation first because that's the broader one. Disruption is then more specific. Innovation I define in the book is something different that creates value. It's a simple definition, but one that I spent a lot of time crafting. You can break it into two parts. Something different is intentionally vague. That leaves room for both big bang things like hypersonic planes and world saving vaccines, and the day to day stuff that makes the world just a little bit better. And it reminds us that innovation is not the job of the few. It's the responsibility of the many. Anyone can be as successful. Innovator creates value, separates innovation from inputs, precursors, things like invention and creativity. Critically important, of course, but until you take that spark and translate it into whatever kind of value you're trying to create revenues, profits, more satisfied employees, happier children, whatever.

Scott Anthony: In my mind you have not innovated. So that's innovation, something different that creates value. Disruption then, is a category of innovation. Disruptive innovation is usually the phrase that I will use. A disruptive innovation traces back to the research of my mentor, former teacher, former colleague, former friend sadly passed away two early five years ago Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School. The way that I define a disruptive innovation is an innovation that transforms what exists or creates what doesn't. By making the complicated, simple, or the expensive affordable and the basic idea comes to that term disrupt. There are two different ways, Christensen argued in his research, that you could compete. You could sustain, which is doing what you're currently doing better, faster, more efficiently, more effectively. You can disrupt, which means you are fundamentally changing the basis of competition. So you're redefining what performance means and competing in a very different sort of way. And his original research showed when it came to battles of disruptive innovation. Being the market leader was actually a liability. And all things we can talk about in more depth.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. Okay. Well, that's I think it's good to get those definitions out of the way. So innovation something new that creates value.

Scott Anthony: Now I would say something different. Something different. I would have big debates back in my prior career. Second career I started teaching here at talk a few years ago. First career was 20 plus years as a consultant. Big debates at NSA, whether we use the word new or different now new goes back to the Latin roots of the word innovation. Lots of reasons for it. I ended up choosing different because it's a bigger tent. New is a pretty big bar, a pretty high bar. You say doing something new is really hard. Something different. Feels like anybody could do that. So I accept either. I think either is okay, but I prefer different over new.

Kirk Kardashian: Overview. Okay. Well we'll go with. We'll go with different something different that creates value. I like that. That's really succinct. Um, so speaking of innovation and disruption, you've written a couple of books. Many books. Right? Eight so far.

Scott Anthony: Somewhere in between. A couple and many. I always play from behind. My. My grandfather was a professor for 40 years. He wrote 29 books in his career. Most of them were academic textbooks. But still I have done eight and have 21 to go. And now 20 after this comes out. Grandpa.

Kirk Kardashian: Well, you got your work cut out for you. Uh, so you've written. Uh, yeah, let's just put a number on it. Eight previous books. Um, and they've been mostly about innovation and disruption. Right? Um, so why this book? Why now?

Scott Anthony: Yeah. You know, it's an interesting question and I'll tell you the origin story of the book. This is different in a couple of ways. First, it's different because the book was not actually my idea. So a couple of years ago, I sent a proposal to Kevin Evers, who is my editor over at Harvard Business Review press just released a book earlier this year about the strategic genius of Taylor Swift. Highly recommend the book. It really interesting looking at lessons you learn from a star unlike any we've ever seen before. Anyway, I sent a proposal to Kevin, which essentially was the class that I teach the elective class I teach MBAs here called Leading Disruptive Change, and I called the book proposal. I think the Tao of Disruptive Change make it a little bit catchier. Kevin said interesting proposal. Would love to do it at some point, but we have another idea for you. So, you know, we were having a team brainstorming meeting, and the prior year, Harvard Business Publishing had named disruption one of four ideas that had changed the business world. And he said, what about doing a history book on disruption? That's the second thing that's different. So I got into a discussion with Kevin, ultimately said, this is cool. Decide to do the book. So number one, it wasn't my idea. Number two, the history book. And like history book, I've not done history books before. My books historically have been. I'll get some case studies. From the case studies. We'll extract some frameworks. There'll be some tools to wrap around the frameworks. Very classic business books, particularly those done by consultants. This one really is okay. Let go of all that.

Scott Anthony: Let's just go and look at some stories and see what comes when we look at those stories. And as you go through the book, there's an a part of the book which is here's the story and there's kind of a, B and C part, which is implications what you might do with it that's not foreground, that's in the background, which ended up being a ton of fun. I had no expectations when I started doing it because again, I've not done it before, but it was kind of fun to innovate while working on a book about innovation. It felt kind of appropriate. So that's why. And then to your question, why now? Well, it turns out I think the timing has been pretty fortuitous. I first learned about the idea of disruptive innovation 25 years ago, when I was a student of Clayton Christensen's at what our dean would call the Tuck of Allston, Massachusetts. So at Harvard Business School and at the time, disruption was a pretty narrow concept. So high technology industries for sure, but not something that was applicable to the general economy today. Everybody is wrestling with some degree of disruptive change. Alex Partners had a report that came out earlier this year that said two thirds of executives say they are facing imminent disruption. So that's something that you really see in every nook and cranny of the global economy. So what once was something that was niched now is really mainstream, yet there's a lot of misunderstanding about what disruption is and what it is, not what the implications of disruption are. And I'm hoping my book will help to clarify some of that.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, yeah. Well, it sounds like it's really good timing from my perspective. I just noticed the words disruption and innovation being used a lot more in the past, maybe 20 years. I'm not sure if that's been your experience too, but I wondered if you could talk about if that's true, and maybe why is disruption such a big thing these days? Is it because of technology that's really causing this, this disruption, you know, to disruption to be such a popular issue?

Scott Anthony: Yeah, it's a great question. And there's lots of avenues we can go to explore it. So let me start by saying. Short answer. Yes. So when the term first began to enter the business lexicon, it's 30 years ago now, the short origin story of Clayton Christensen. His first career was as a consultant. He then worked in government for a little bit, then became the CEO of a ceramics processing company. That company ultimately iPod Clay, decided to leave that company and become an academic in his late 30s, which is a pretty unusual career path. So he had that experience of being a consultant and a business executive before doing his research. His research question is why is it that great companies fail? Great research question why bad companies fail. Pretty easy. Not that interesting. Why well-run companies fail. Really juicy. Interesting question to interrogate. And in his research, he identified this phenomenon of disruptive innovation that, as we talked about before, sometimes someone comes in with something really different and it's actually really hard for the incumbent historically to respond to it. So his first mainstream article in the Harvard Business Review comes out in 1995. The Innovator's Dilemma comes out in 1997. It's the same time the commercial internet is beginning to emerge. You have companies like Google and Amazon and then ultimately Facebook, later renamed meta and so on. And this idea of disruption kind of captured the zeitgeist of what was going on with many of these companies. So I think it really was the right idea at the right time that then as you have further developments of technology, generative AI and drones and additive manufacturing, 3D printing and so on, you begin to see that this is not an isolated phenomenon.

Scott Anthony: So point number one, I think technology is a driver in the ubiquity of the term. Point number two is just a good phrase. Like you say, the word disruption, it sounds like something that's interesting. You want to learn more about it. It's the thing that Clay ultimately would come to regret a little bit. There was an article in the New Yorker about ten years ago, Harvard historian Jill Lepore, basically tearing apart a lot of the research that underpinned The Innovator's Dilemma and saying, you know what? The gospel of innovation got wrong. And what she was basically complaining about is something that Clay complained about, which is the term being used for something that was other than its original intended use. It had a very particular meaning when he was talking about disruption. It wasn't any type of big change. It was a specific type of big change, an intentional trade off in performance, making the complicated simple, making the expensive, affordable, competing in different ways, typically starting outside of mainstream markets to begin with, when the word disruption is used for everything. It loses its meaning. So it was kind of a victim of its own success to a degree. And in some cases there was backlash against it. So that's a little bit of an answer to your question.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. No, I appreciate that. Um, I think that's interesting. Um, one thing I read in your book that I had never heard before, and I'm not sure if I'm getting this right, but it did. Did Clayton Christiansen, um, regret not being able to connect with Jill Lepore when she was writing that piece?

Scott Anthony: He would tell a story, and I cannot confirm nor deny that this story is true. But. But what he said is he went over to her office. She has an office across the river in Cambridge as opposed to Allston, and left a note saying, I understand you're working on this story and would love to talk with you about it. And he never heard from her. Now, I've talked to other academics about it and say, look, when you're doing this type of article that Lepore is working on, you actually don't want to talk to the protagonist. You want to do your own independent investigation. I don't know. But he would contrast that to Joshua Gans, who's a professor who wrote the book The Disruption Dilemma, that really goes and looks very deeply and very critically at Clay's research and some of the implications from it. And it's a very balanced, new and nuanced book that says, yes, there are some circumstances where what the framework says plays out. There's other circumstances where the evidence is mixed, other circumstances where it actually doesn't seem to fit at all. And what Clay really appreciated is Josh gave him an early copy of the book, and Clay gave him lots of feedback, and Josh made some changes based on the feedback and didn't go away from his findings, but just put a little bit more nuance in it.

Scott Anthony: You know, Clay, he famously had this sign in his office that said anomalies wanted. One of his big beliefs, was a good scholar. Really loves it when someone says, this doesn't work, it's wrong. In this circumstance, I see something else, because the only way you learn and make a theory more robust is by finding those edge cases. So when he was horrifically wrong about the Apple iPhone, which he said when it launched that it will fail. That was a great moment of learning for him, because he realized he didn't have the competitive set, right, and a whole bunch of other things. So he always did truly seek out people who criticize people who saw different things in an effort to learn and make his ideas better. So again, back to your question. He felt like he was maybe a missed opportunity with Jill Lepore.

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Kirk Kardashian: Well, let's talk about your book. So it's a very straightforward format. You have 11 disruptive innovations throughout history. 11 chapters. Um, some of the innovations are ones that people might expect, such as the iPhone, the printing press, and the model T, but others are less obvious, like the scientific revolution, Julia Child and French Cooking, Pampers, and Florence Nightingale's approach to healthcare. Um, out of the hundreds, if not thousands of disruptive innovations out there. How did you pick the 11 to focus on in your book?

Scott Anthony: Uh, again, a really good question. Uh, a couple things. So first, as always, something that looks straightforward. There is a mess that has to happen before it ends up looking straightforward. And what you see in the final version of the book, as has been the case for every book that I've written, it's the third version of the book. And the first version did not follow that formula. It had some chapters on innovation, some chapter on thinkers. I couldn't quite figure out what it wanted to be. And then you go and look at it. Get feedback from friends and editors. Like, the stories are really good. The people are less good. So really focus on the stories. And I had probably 7 or 8 at that point. And then I just kind of randomly looked around and found a few others. So, you know, you say, why those 11? I don't have a great answer to that. It was a little bit of in the first discussion with Kevin Evers from Harvard. He said, start with gunpowder. Why not? And like, cool, gunpowder is fun. And then you just go in the memory banks and say, you know, I went back and looked at the innovator's dilemma and innovative Solution, Clay's first and second book, and he had a table in The Innovator's Solution, going through the list of historical disruptions.

Scott Anthony: Say, what feels like it would be an interesting story to look at. And Florence Nightingale and Julia Child, I don't exactly know where those came from, because it's not in Clay's book and they're not obvious things. I don't know, I just started looking into both of them and say, there's just something really interesting here. And at the end of the day, you want something that, of course, illustrates important Principles and is interesting so that people actually want to turn the page and keep reading about it. So it's a little random-walky and I mentioned this in the book. Every time I start talking to people about it though, what about start? Because I remember early conversation with my good friend Tom Caputo, who's a student as now a student, a classmate of mine here at Dartmouth. He's like fertilizer. You have to have fertilizer and like, there's no fertilizer. And other people would have this thing or that thing or this person or that person. In the end, we have the 11 that are there and why 11? I really like the movie Spinal Tap. This one goes to 11. Certain people will understand that many people will not, but this one goes to 11. Well, I get it. You understand me? I could I could see in your face as soon as I'm old.

Kirk Kardashian: Enough to get.

Scott Anthony: That one. Yeah, I tried to. I got four kids and tried to show them Spinal Tap and it just was lost in them. And my wife and I told them, really? You have to watch it three times. The first time it's like, this is kind of silly. The second time it's like, this is. And the third time you get it and the kids are like, we're not going to be doing that. Yeah. So it goes.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah.

Speaker5: You see, most, most blokes are going to be playing at ten. You're on ten here all the way up, all the way up, all the way up. You're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where? I don't know. Nowhere exactly. What we do is if we need that extra push over the cliff. You know what we do? Put it up to 11. Exactly one lap.

Speaker6: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Speaker5: These guys are 11.

Kirk Kardashian: You had to whittle all your all these disruptions down to 11. I'm going to ask you again, even harder question. Can you whittle them down to just say three that we can go into more detail about here?

Scott Anthony: The three that I would nominate are gunpowder. Julia Child.

Speaker7: Welcome to the French show. I'm Julia Child.

Scott Anthony: And the Ford Model T. Gunpowder was Kevin's first suggestion. It was the first chapter that I wrote, something I had never thought of before, and something that really, I think helped me figure out what the book wanted to be. So, you know, the chapter starts were in 1453. You've got an army that's approaching the Theodosian Walls and Constantinople walls that had stood for a thousand years. And then ultimately, of course, gunpowder enables this massive cannon to go and take those walls down. And the city falls in 47 days. And the click moment for me is I told that story and said, you know, this, the story took, you know, 1400 years to get up to this. Gunpowder traces back to 132. There's all sorts of fun things that happen with alchemists, philosophers and all that. But the thing that was really important to me is when I had the first draft of the book, I sent it around to a few friends and someone said, oh, this is exactly like Nokia in 2007. I'm like, oh, I hadn't thought about that. But you have something where it looks like the city is impenetrable. You have a literal moat around the city. But then a technology comes in and changes everything. And Nokia had a famous cover story in 2007 with the CEO. 1 billion customers. Can anyone catch the cell phone King? And of course, we know the answer to that question now because the technology came in and changed the game. So I said, okay, great. We now won't know what we're going to do in the book. We'll tell the story. Then we'll look at the echo that we see in the present. So that's why I picked gunpowder.

Speaker8: Back in Detroit, Henry Ford wondered how he could bring the price of the model T down to where everybody could buy it. He figured that the more cars he made and sold, the cheaper he could sell each one. And he went to work on this idea.

Scott Anthony: The model T is just super fun, you know, as you go in and look at any of these case studies, you see things that are interesting. I think I did not know is the battle for the soul of the streets of New York in the 1920s. At any time you can talk about jayhawkers and flivver boobs. It's a good day and we might talk about jayhawkers and flivver boobs later on. I'll just leave that there for now. Okay. And then Julia Child just. It's such a fun story. It just, you know, it shows you when you go and study these things, you just find amazing things. And you think you know the story, and you look at it through another lens. And Julia Child was not a great chef from the day she was born. Born in 1912, in Pasadena, California. She couldn't boil water was a joke that her husband, Paul, one of his nephews, said when they first met her, the first meal she cooked for her husband, she tried to cook brains, which of course is naturally what you cook for her first. And it was a disaster. She failed an exam at Le Cordon Bleu at the cooking school, so she was not born to be a chef. The book mastering the Art of French Cooking took ten years of work to get out, with failures and fumbles along the way. So it illustrates great, great practices and principles that you see in any story of disruptive innovation. And it's just a super fun story.

Speaker7: So we're about to see a French omelet being made.

Kirk Kardashian: Talk a little bit about why you think Julia Child was a disruptive innovator.

Scott Anthony: Yeah. So go back to the way we define disruption. Takes the complicated, makes it simple. Takes the expensive. Make it affordable. If you're living in the United States in the 1950s and you want to enjoy great French food, what do you do? You get in an airplane. That's your only. So. Not very many people could enjoy French food because it's expensive. It's perceived to be very complicated. It's out of the reach of the layperson cooking in their home. Julia Child changed that. She simplified something that was very complex. Put it in a cookbook, then on television shows so anyone can do it. And when she did that, she followed the behaviors that are very consistent with successful innovation. The book that I had that was before this one is called eat, sleep, innovate. That book is about how do you create a culture of innovation. It argues that there are five behaviors that you want to be habitual. If you want an innovative culture. You want curiosity. Customer obsession. Collaboration. Being adept in ambiguity and being empowered. That's the Julia Child story. She was intensely curious. She went and talked to departments of fisheries to understand the different fish species in different countries. She was really customer obsessed. She put herself in the shoes of the person who was cooking, imagining herself or actually being that person, saying not enough for me as a trained chef to do this.

Scott Anthony: A normal person has to do it. When you open up your cookbook and see ingredients on one side, recipe on the other. That was Julia Child, because again, she put herself in those shoes. She collaborated whether it was the co-authors of her first book or finding other chefs trying to bring people together to go and come up with creative solutions. She was really good at handling the twists and turns that come along with any innovative success. Mastering the Art of French Cooking went through three different publishers. There was a near-death moment in 1958 when the publication was the public. The I'm sorry when the publisher said, we're actually not going to publish this book. After many years of work. She could handle that. And empowered. She was amazingly empowered. She just got stuff done. So you have this great story of somebody that shows that disruption isn't just about technology. It can come in lots of forms and showcases the behaviors that don't require creative genius to follow, but do have to be done with discipline. If you are going to do something different, that creates value.

Kirk Kardashian: Well, that's that's really thought provoking.

Scott Anthony: Um, and I can say that her chocolate mousse recipe is delicious. It took a couple goes for me to get it right. And my wife and I will laugh about what happened. It did not go well the first time. The second time almost went badly wrong, but got it right in the end. Yeah. Even I could do it. And I'm not a particularly good chef.

Kirk Kardashian: Oh, well, that sounds good. Oh, maybe I should try that. Uh, yeah. I mean, it seems like Julia Child was really ahead of her time. I mean, think about YouTube now, right? I mean, YouTube is full of people like Julia Child showing you how to do complicated things in a, in a very methodical way that broken down into steps. Right. I mean, if she had if YouTube had been around when she were, when she was, you know, working on her book, I mean, that she would have been even bigger.

Scott Anthony: I absolutely agree. And she would have jumped in feet first. You know, she was always one who would go and say, let's give it a go. Let's try it out. And I bet you would have been a YouTube TikTok named the Platform Star. You know, in that chapter twos. I think I enjoyed writing about it. We had this funny moment in our household last year. Yeah, this is the echo of the Julia Child story, where our oldest son, Charlie, was doing a senior project for his school where he and a bunch of his friends renovated a bus and then had a plan to drive the bus across the country.

Speaker9: The teens documenting their progress on social media, garnering more than 2 million followers.

Scott Anthony0: Getting all of us, all five, and the rest of our friends together in one project has been a really important experience for us.

Scott Anthony: And they started posting videos on Instagram and TikTok and for whatever reason, and we cannot figure out why. It just took off and boys with the bus got to 10,000, 100,000, two plus million followers. And there is Charlie, our then 18 year old, suddenly a social media star along with his friends, and they were on Good Morning America twice.

Speaker9: The boys are finally ready to hit the road. Their first stop.

Scott Anthony1: Good morning America. We'll see you in Times Square.

Scott Anthony2: Yes. And the boys with the bus are here with us now.

Scott Anthony: The bus started breaking down and people got bored and went on to the next thing, and that kind of was that. But it's a showcase of how the world of media has really changed, where it just requires a phone and the right bit of things come together, and all of a sudden you have the ability to be your personality. Democratization and transformation in that industry is really quite astounding.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. Wow. That's really cool. I mean, uh, you must have been proud to see your son become a social star.

Scott Anthony: I will say, Kirk, the thing that I was proudest of is you could see his feet were firmly on the ground. It's easy to get, you know, when you got all these followers and people start, like meta is offering them free product and whatever. To have all this stuff thrown at you, it's easy to get overwhelmed by it and be like, forget school, this is going to be my future. And Charlie and the rest of the boys are like, this is really fun. We're going to enjoy it as much as we can, but we know this is not what our life is going to be, so let's have fun with it. But let's also recognize reality. And we're not going to serialize this and become, you know, people who do this for the next ten years. That, above all else, is what I appreciated. I mean, it's super cool for him to be on Good Morning America twice, but that that was the part of his apparent that I was very happy about.

Speaker9: You're about to you're in the middle of Times Square. Yeah. Okay. Get on that bus and drive, guys. Enjoy the journey. Take the money. Thank you so much. Okay, you got to get on this bus. It's not safe to sit up there. I can't let you do that.

Kirk Kardashian: So let's go back to the model T for a second. Um, is the disruption there, the idea that, um, regular Americans could have, um, mobility like, like that or was it more the, the, um, the Ford method, you know, of the assembly line and or was it the assembly line that kind of facilitated that mobility?

Scott Anthony: Yeah, you got it. Exactly. Right. So, you know, Ford, his vision, Henry Ford, his vision was to create a car for the multitudes. So the automobile emerges in the 1870s, 1880s as something that is a completely different form of transportation. But it's complicated. It's expensive. So therefore only very few people could enjoy it. Coming up with assembly line technologies and techniques coming up with new ways to dramatically reduce the amount of employee turnover by increasing the amount that you pay people, and coming up with ways to enable people to fix cars on their own, created a way to dramatically Decrease the cost of the car. When the first version of the model T came out. In today's terms, it was about 30,000 USD through the assembly line and some of the other changes, it got down to about 6,000 USD, which still meant that it was real money, but something that dramatically expanded the marketplace. You know, the thing that I really like about that story, I have to go back to the flipper boobs because.

Kirk Kardashian: Oh, yeah, let's go into that.

Scott Anthony: You know, the the thing that I came to realize through doing all these stories is innovation always casts a shadow. So, you know, of course, I believe innovation. I believe disruption is not a good thing. It leads to creation, leads to new opportunities and so on. But you also want to recognize that there's two sides to every story. And there are downsides. There are dark moments. There are bad things that can happen. So in the case of the automobile in the 1920s, you had this battle emerge. So cities were built for people, not for cars. So on one side you had the pedestrians who say, what's happening in our streets? We have people who are taking them over. And the other side, you had the people who like driving cars who said, well, we want to be able to drive our cars wherever we want. People were dying. It's not a good thing because there weren't rules, even the norms that you follow, like when you're making a left turn, you don't immediately cut the corner when you're making a left if you're in the US. Obviously it would inverse in other countries you go and go wide before you make the turn. That didn't exist. There are no stoplights, so there's just lots of bad things are happening. A part of sorting this out was a public relations campaign.

Scott Anthony: On the one hand, the motorist said it's the pedestrians fault, so we are going to brand them as Jayhawkers. Aj is a country bumpkin, a walker, obviously someone who walks. They got the Boy Scouts to give out cards at the side of the road. Say don't be a J. Walker. Make sure that you let the cars have space. Well, the pedestrians fought back. They said it's not our fault. We're going to brand the people who are driving as flivver boobs. Flivver is an old term for a car, and boob is kind of a universal term. Now, if you type in Flivver boob and Microsoft Word, now you get the distinctive red squiggles. The word no longer is in existence if you look at n gram or other sorts of things. It peaks around 1925 and then disappears in 1930. In 1925, the traffic commissioner of New York said, we now know about 80% of the things that happen on the road are the fault of the pedestrians. The automobile enthusiasts won the battle. I take from this again, there is a shadow there. There's a bad thing that happens when innovation happens. And also, again, the middle looks really messy. You know, if you think about artificial intelligence today and the boomers versus the Dumas, it's nothing new. Every time a new technology comes, you get both sides.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Flivver boobs. I'm not sure I've ever heard that term before.

Scott Anthony: I had never. I find all sorts of good things. I found this random book that someone had written about what happened in the 19 tens and 1920s to hasten the spread of the automobile. And that's where I saw the story. And it is a good one. I fact checked it. You know, I'm not a historian, but I did try to make sure that I at least had two sources for everything that I had in the book. I'm sure there are some things that real historians will say. Yeah, but, you know, I've done enough business writing to know that every business book, to a degree, is a work of fiction. You're always kind of polishing the edges a little bit to tell a story. So I acknowledge it's not perfect history. Hopefully still useful history.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. No. Definitely useful. Um, yeah. Flivver boom. Sounds like something I would imagine Monty Burns saying in The Simpsons or something. You know.

Scott Anthony: That is. I do not know if there is a Simpsons episode, but I now want to go check that because I would not be surprised, actually, if that appeared in The Simpsons episode. You Got the right character too.

Kirk Kardashian: So what's the what's the modern echo to the model? T is the one you just mentioned about the like the two like the dichotomy.

Scott Anthony: And you could pick any. So in the book I talk about lab grown meat. So lab grown meat on the one side, you have people who are, you know, Silicon Valley enthusiasts who say it will be a more affordable way to get protein, it's better for the environment you can customize, etc. on the other side, you have people who say this is Franken meat. This is going to destroy people who are farmers. Et cetera, etc.. So, you know, you pick the innovation. You're going to see both sides to it so you can see it. For in the conclusion of the book, there are ten in process disruptions, all ten of them. You will see both sides to the story. And ultimately 20 or 30 years from now, when things are sorted out, it will seem inevitable the way things played out. But nothing is inevitable. It's people who do things, people who make choices that ultimately determine what happens. So that's why very consciously, the last chapter or the conclusion of the book, I make no predictions because who knows? I try and say, here are some questions that you, based on history, would want to ask if you're trying to make sense of these things.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah, I think that was smart. That was that was a good a good bet, I think. I bet not to make. I guess you could say.

Scott Anthony: I will say the conclusion. It was the third version of the conclusion to. So the first version of the conclusion, I tried speculative fiction where I said, let's imagine my family in 2040. And here's an imagined trip to McDonald's where we're enjoying alternative proteins and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Universally panned by all reviewers. I really liked it, but the reviewers were like, that's not going to work. I know you love your kids and you had fun writing about them, but no one else is going to care. And you're going to be horrifically wrong when one reviewer says something, I listen. When every reviewer says something, I act. So in this case, he said, let's try something different and took a couple tries to get the final version, but I think it worked pretty well.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah. No, definitely. Um, so speaking of, I guess, all these different case studies that, you know, that you have in your book, um, you know, they, they span thousands of years and they come from around the world. Um, but what I find especially interesting about the book is that you found some consistent truths about innovation, whether it's gunpowder or transistors. Um, can you tell us some of those common threads and what they mean for innovators today?

Scott Anthony: Yeah, absolutely. So we have already talked about two of them. So we talked about how innovation casts a shadow. And that shadow can be the external shadow where you've got the flavor moves versus the Jayhawkers and fatalities and all that. It can be an internal shadow where an organization doesn't innovate because it's concerned about shifting power dynamics and all that. In the book, I one of the best finds is the 1548 proclamation by King Edward, the Sixth Proclamation against those that doth innovate. And of course, you look at it through modern eyes. It looks ridiculous. But of course, if you were innovating in 1548, you are questioning the status quo, which meant you were questioning the King or questioning God. And that was a really bad thing. And of course, no one issues proclamations like that today, but still many organizations. If you are disrupting the status quo inside an organization, that can be a scary thing. So innovation casts a shadow. A second lesson that ties to the Julia Child story innovation is predictably unpredictable. You never know exactly what's going to happen, but there are very clear patterns, behaviors that people follow that lead to increase the odds of success. You have. The hero's journey. The Julia Child followed where she had the call to adventure, and she fell into the abyss and she emerged triumphant and all that. So the patterns are really consistent.

Scott Anthony: The other two that are worth maybe spending a little bit more time on the first one. I didn't call it this in the book, but I will introduce new language here. Every story has heroes, every story has heroes. And this is a kind of dumb moment that I had historically. When I would write a book, I would say a company did a thing. So like Procter and Gamble created Pampers. But that's not true. Procter and gamble doesn't do anything. Procter and gamble said it. It's not a person. Procter and gamble did have a senior executive that appointed Vick Mills to lead a department. He then appointed Bob Duncan to go and lead an effort. He formed a team that involved dozens of people. Those are the people who did it. So there always are people who are doing it. And I use the word heroes there. This is not one. There's a myth that innovation is alone. Genius. But it's never the case. Gutenberg and the printing press. We have those two names together. But Gutenberg had a team. Gutenberg had a financial backer that, by the way, ended up suing him and taking his technology and all that. But there's always multiple people involved in it. So organizations that are like, I need the loan genius to come in and solve all my innovation problems will be waiting forever because there is no such thing.

Scott Anthony: Every story has heroes. Go and support them as much as you can. And then the final lesson is that innovation requires patience, perseverance, often over long periods of time. So I mentioned Pampers very quickly. Here is the short version of the pamper story. 1954 The Exploratory Development Division is set up. 1956 the effort to create Pampers Bob Duncan as its leader is commissioned. 1958 it fails its first test market because the product quality is too low. 1960 it fails its now third test market because the price point is too high. 1962 the development team goes on a fishing trip and says, we thought we were going to come up with a premium price disposable diaper. We got to slash the price by 40%. That's the only way we're going to succeed. 1964 they finally kind of succeed, though it takes longer than they think. 1965 they launch under the brand Pampers. 1970 dominate the market. It goes on to be the biggest brand in PNG's history. First brand across 10 billion in sales. Not an overnight success. There are no overnight successes. People say the pace of innovation is accelerating. Surely true, but it still requires patience, perseverance over long periods of time. If you can't go through those twists and turns and false starts and fumbles and occasional failures, you will never succeed. So those lessons are very persistent across the case studies. Hmm.

Kirk Kardashian: Um, one of the more interesting ideas in the book is about the nature of innovation. Uh, you say that, quote, technology develops faster than people's lives change to adapt to the technology. And then you go on to explain that that dynamic causes companies to overshoot their customers needs, which creates opportunities for other firms to offer a similar product at a lower price point, basically disruption. What we were talking about. Um, where do you see that happening today, and how can people use your book to find such opportunities for themselves or, you know, managers, businesses?

Scott Anthony: Yeah. So I one of the ways I would always illustrate this point, just a broad level. Before I get into specifics, I say, just imagine the last time you were in a hotel room and you picked up a remote control somewhere. There's an engineer who thought that 49th button, that was really going to be the one that improved the user experience. But for most of us, you're like, I'm not going to push any of these buttons. I don't know what they do, I don't care. There's too many features in it. I I'll take them, but I don't want to pay for that. So then Apple, when it comes out with this Apple TV, it basically has four buttons on it. And it's super simple, easy to use and elegant. And that's what people wanted. They wanted something that was easier to use versus something that had more features and functionality packed into it. So I think that's a pretty easy way to remember it. Where do you see this happening right now? Well, as we're recording this, the advertising industry has just gotten back from its annual love affair to itself at con, where it said, aren't we great? We're making ads that are even more creative than they ever were before. Forget this technology stuff. Humans are doing amazing things. And I'm sure it's true that humans are doing amazing things, but most advertisement that's done today is algorithmic, programmatic, simple stuff that is done through algorithms and machines. So making something that has even higher production value, that has even better actors in it, even better live action things. The industry itself might care about it, but you and I and the people who are actually advertising products don't really care about it. You can look at other examples that are maybe a little bit more tragic to think about.

Scott Anthony: Look at what's going on in the world of defense. So in many countries, people were building bigger and bigger planes and submarines and so on. And as we have seen very sadly in the conflict in Ukraine, it's very affordable drones that have changed the face of warfare. So it's not the super complicated stuff that has features that will probably and hopefully never get used. It's the stuff that is simple, adaptable and flexible that is really changing the way that people are fighting wars. That's not a happy form of innovation, but I think it's another example of the principles in action. How do you use all this stuff? Well, the most important thing always, anytime you're thinking about innovation is that second behavior I mentioned for Julia Child, customer obsession. The challenge that many organizations run into is they look at the world through their eyes. And of course, the 49th button is a great additional button. They forget that ultimately they're serving somebody. So the trick is to look at it through the eyes of the consumer, customer, channel partner, whoever you're trying to serve and say, what is the problem they're trying to solve? What is the fundamental job they're trying to get done? And is this thing I'm thinking about doing? Will it help them get the job done? If we weren't doing it this way, could we do it in a completely different way? Is there something in the emerging technologies that are out there, additive manufacturing, things in smart health, things that go on in cryptocurrency, whatever. Are there things out there that might allow us to compete in a very different way, that might allow us, in fact, to go and disrupt? That's the way I would think about it.

Kirk Kardashian: Mm. Okay, okay. Uh, I mean, you must get asked a lot whether you think AI is a disruptive technology. Um. And what are your thoughts on that?

Scott Anthony: You know, the way that Clay would always answer questions like this is he would say he has no opinions about any technology. It's models and theories that offer opinion. And I think AI is very much like the commercial internet was a few decades ago. Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly, generative AI will have ultimate disruptive impact on a range of different industries. In other industries, it will not. It will help people sustain and improve what they're currently doing. So, for example, people who are working in consumer packaged goods industries are using generative AI as ways to run faster market tests and come up with new product ideas more quickly and experiment with different product designs and come up with different things you do on shelf, etc. it will not fundamentally disrupt the chocolate that you eat, the snacks you have, and so on. In industries like consulting or dare I say, education generative AI will have. Medium and long term disruptive impact. Exactly how those stories are being written right now. But I think there's very little doubt back to Sir Francis Bacon in 1629. Before or after. It will be a line before or after. I just think I'm only in year three of teaching. I'm already changing the way I'm thinking about how do I impart knowledge? How do I measure whether students have learned anything? How do I develop knowledge? So this is something that I think will only have more impact in the years ahead. I view that is really exciting. Chances to experiment, play and do new things. It can also feel pretty threatening and scary as well. Such is the nature of change.

Kirk Kardashian: Yeah for sure. Maybe in a hundred years when someone writes the volume two of your book, they'll conclude, I don't know.

Scott Anthony: The now I'm imagining a hundred years from now, I don't want to do any speculative fiction. I got into trouble for doing that before. But, you know, will there still be books in 100 years? What will what will it look like? And who knows, I will say. You know one thing that's just interesting. The behind the scenes publishing thing. My first book came out in 2004, so it was 21 years ago. The actual process of putting a book together, the process of producing a book, the process of disseminating it into the world, has actually changed. Almost not at all in 21 years. There didn't used to be digital books, so now there are. But for business books, still 80% of books are physical books. So, you know, I think we, the Amoros line or gates is law, depending on who you ask. We always underestimate or overestimate the amount of change in the short run and underestimate in the long run. These things take longer than it often seems they should.

Kirk Kardashian: But yeah. Yeah. Well, so as a consultant, as a teacher, um, I'm sure that you were kind of hoping to, to take some really strong lessons away from all this work that you did to make this book. Um, how do you how do you sort of summarize your key takeaways from all this work?

Scott Anthony: Yeah. So, you know, I can answer that question in two ways. Let me let me answer it both ways. So one is what did I learn about innovation from the process of putting together a book on innovation. And there's a couple things that I say there. The first is sometimes the great ideas come when you're not looking for them. So this book was not my idea. This book was Kevin Evers and the team at Harvard's idea. I can take full credit for it now because my name is on it, but it wasn't my idea. So as an innovator, your eyes have to be open is sometimes what is the great idea? And I really do. I love the book. I think it came together really nicely and I'm very grateful, Kevin, for suggesting it. The idea comes in a place you don't expect it to come from. That's lesson number one. Lesson number two, the first version is not the final version. The first version of the book is completely different than the final version. The first book I called, what did I call it? Magic Methods and Madness How Disruptive Innovators Change the world. The second version was called Anomalies Wanted How Disruptive Innovators Changed the World. The third version was epic Disruptions.

Scott Anthony: And it wasn't just the title that changed. It was the case studies, it was the writing style, etc.. This is true for any innovative idea. The first version and the final version are really, really different things. Then the third thing I would say is how you figure that out is by running experiments. So back at the end of 2023, before I'd written a word, I'd done kind of the baseline research. I had not written a word. I had a chance. I was doing a webinar that was sponsored by Harvard Business Impact. So an online program 90 minutes long. I knew the client well. I figured it was a pretty low risk environment. I said, you know, I feel like now's a chance where I can do a rough prototype of the book and do a 90 minute session. That's all epic disruptions. It was rough. My stories didn't always finish. And, you know, I hadn't practiced the transitions, but the feedback was off the charts. It was like the best feedback I've ever gotten. And I learned that people really like old stories. So it was a chance to go and test things. It affirmed to me that I was going generally in the right direction and showed me lots of different things that I need to do.

Scott Anthony: So if you're not sure if an idea is right or not, find a way to test it and go and do that actively versus just thinking about it, that's the only way that you learn. So those are three lessons I learned about innovation from writing a book about innovation. About what did I learn about innovation itself? It really comes back to the four key lessons that thread through the book that I'll just repeat here. So we've got them in summary. Lesson number one innovation is not the job of the few. It's the responsibility of the many. Every innovation story has heroes. Lesson number two innovation is predictably unpredictable. Following the behaviors the Julia Child followed increases the odds of success. Nothing is guaranteed. Lesson number three innovation casts a shadow. Be aware of that shadow. If you're dealing with an external one, recognize there are both sides to it. If you're dealing with an internal one, recognize. If you don't overcome it, it can swallow your innovation effort. Lesson number four innovation requires patient perseverance over often long periods of time. As a leader, you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable or you will never succeed. Wow.

Kirk Kardashian: Well those are great lessons, Scott, and it's a really fun book. I really enjoyed reading it. Um, so good luck with it. And, uh, and thanks for coming here to talk about it, I appreciate it.

Scott Anthony: My pleasure. Kirk, thanks for the great conversation.

Kirk Kardashian: I'd like to thank my guest, Scott Anthony. You have been listening to Knowledge and Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Please like and subscribe to the show. And if you enjoyed it, then please write a review as it helps people find the show. This show was recorded by me, Kirk Kardashian. It was produced and sound designed by Tom Walley. See you next time.