Disruption Used to Take a Decade. Now It Takes a Year.
Christensen wrote about disk drives in 1997. The framework now applies to your career.
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Clayton Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. He studied four industries:
Disk drives
Hydraulic excavators
Mini-mills
Discount retail
He found one pattern across all four.
Well-managed companies failed for rational reasons. Their best customers wanted sustaining improvements. Resources flowed to those customers. The bottom of the market and the non-consumers stayed open. Disruptors entered there. Then climbed.
The arc took fifteen years in disk drives. Twenty in mini-mills. The framework assumed the incumbent had time to see the disruptor coming.
That assumption no longer holds.
The arc compressed.
AI-mediated production collapses the entrant’s cost curve to weeks. A junior analyst with copilots ships in two hours what a partner shipped in two days. Non-consumers reach the entrant through autonomous discovery, not through gatekeeper introductions. The decade Christensen documented is the year you are living through.
The framework still holds. The clock changed.
The framework now applies to careers.
If your role exists because clients valued the capability that an entrant can deliver at one-tenth the cost, you are the incumbent. Your sustaining improvements are your annual reviews. Your best customers are the bosses and partners who reward the work that no longer earns its premium.
Doing more of what is rewarded is exactly what causes the position to be lost.
The dilemma is identical at the personal scale.
The Worksheet
The worksheet is a single document with six steps.
Run it twice. Once for the company. Once for the career.
The six steps surface the dilemma in the order that matters. Name the customer. Audit the sustaining improvements. Identify the bottom of your market. Run the substitute scan.
Score the separation. Pick one move for the next ninety days.
Each step takes about ten minutes. Both passes take an hour. The worksheet has fillable answer blocks because the value is in writing the answers down. The discipline is the deliverable.
The career pass is where the framework earns its keep. Most operators have run a Christensen analysis on a company. Almost none have run one on themselves. The output is uncomfortable on purpose. The customers paying you for capability they no longer use are the ones you need to identify before they identify you.
The Prompt Pack
The prompt pack is five prompts that turn the worksheet into a recurring practice with a capable model.
Prompt 1: Diagnose your situation against the framework.
Prompt 2: Stress-test the diagnosis under the AI-era inversion, where the arc collapses from a decade to twelve months.
Prompt 3: Translate the analysis to your operating tier. Solo operator, startup founder, or small business strategist.
Prompt 4: Forces a decision and a ninety-day commitment.
Prompt 5: Schedules the practice with named trigger conditions for early re-runs.
Run them in sequence. Each prompt builds on the previous one. The fifth prompt makes this a quarterly review, not a one-time exercise. That is the only version of the practice that survives contact with a busy quarter.
The pack works against any capable model. Curly-brace placeholders mark the fields you fill in. The output is structured. The whole sequence runs in about forty minutes once you have the inputs.
Why both?
The worksheet is for the operator who wants to think the framework through with a pen. The prompt pack is for the operator who wants the model to do the structural work and reserve their attention for the decisions that matter.
Most subscribers will use both. The worksheet anchors the first pass and produces a baseline you can hand to a colleague or a coach. The prompt pack runs every ninety days after that and compares the new analysis to the baseline so you can see what moved.
The combination converts an idea you already know into a practice you actually run and build from. Christensen wrote the book twenty-nine years ago. The reason the framework still gets cited is that the underlying logic is correct. The reason most readers do not act on it is that the framework was written as an analytical instrument, not as an operating methodology. These two assets are my attempt to help you close that gap.
Failure can be the result of rational decisions made well. The implication is that doing more of what is already rewarded is not the answer. Doing different work is.
The disruption is not coming. It arrived while you’ve been waiting to do this work.
- j -
[Download PDF’s of the Prompt Pack and Worksheet below →]
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John Brewton documents the history and future of operating companies at Operating by John Brewton. He is a graduate of Harvard University and began his career as a Phd. student in economics at the University of Chicago. After selling his family’s B2B industrial distribution company in 2021, he has been helping business owners, founders and investors optimize their operations ever since. He is the founder of 6A East Partners, a research and advisory firm asking the question: What is the future of companies? He still cringes at his early LinkedIn posts and loves making content each and everyday, despite the protestations of his beloved wife, Fabiola, at times.
Kinda crazy… nowadays disruption can happen in like a week. 🤣
What’s changed is how quickly what worked stops working.
You see it all the time with social and distribution.
A channel, format, or growth model works, then six months later it’s old hat and every guru pretends they saw it coming.
You can be doing what worked last quarter and still be behind.
That’s what makes all of this harder now.