Virgil as editor: a she-bear licking her cubs

Virgil

Virgil, the great poet of the Aeneid, has already appeared on The Hannibal Blog for his amazing capacity to inspire authors ancient, medieval and modern. And he will appear a lot more anon.

But today let me simply relate to you a little anecdote about Virgil’s method of writing. It comes from Lecture I, Minute 45, of this excellent iTunes U course on the Aeneid.

Virgil worked, as all ancient poets (eg Homer) would have done, by speaking verse out loud while a slave or two transcribed his words.

His style was to come up with perhaps 20 or so lines a day, but then to edit, cut, change those lines relentlessly until only about 3 lines were left at the end of the day.

Some ancient literary critic commenting on this self-editing said that Virgil was like

a she-bear licking her cubs.

To those of you who are writers: Isn’t that a great metaphor?

Now excuse me. I have some cub-licking to do.

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“Sex” or “gender”?

I began the previous post with a parenthetical slur on Americans (of which I am half-one), propping myself up on two creaky stereotypes:

  1. that Americans can’t (really) speak English, and
  2. that political correctness is in part to blame.

Specifically, the issue was which of these two words was correct in the specific context:

  • Sex, or
  • Gender

Well, I thought I might regale you once again with the opinion of Johnny Grimond, our (The Economist‘s) doyen of usage and author of our official Style Guide, in which style quite often becomes a window into a very British, ironic and sophisticated worldview. Here is Johnny on the matter:

Gender is nowadays used in several ways. One is common in feminist writing, where the term has a technical meaning. “One is not born a woman, one becomes one,” argued Simone de Beauvoir: in other words, one chooses one’s gender. In such a context it would be absurd to use the word sex; the term must be gender. But, in using it thus, try to explain what you mean by it. Even feminists do not agree on a definition.

The primary use of gender, though, is in grammar, where it applies to words, not people. If someone is female, that is her sex, not her gender. (The gender of Mädchen, the German word for girl, is neuter, as is Weib, a wife or woman.) So do not use gender as a synonym for sex. Gender studies probably means feminism.

See also Political correctness

That said, I seem to remember reading somewhere–and I wish I knew where–that Sandra Day O’Connor started using gender instead of sex when she got to the Supreme Court, because she was worried that the word sex would conjure up all the wrong images in her (male) colleagues’ minds during deliberations.

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The Economist’s women and men

Down under in Melbourne, Solid Gold Creativity has embarked on an intriguing investigation into sex (or “gender”, as the Americans among you might prefer in this context) in journalism.

She found that only 27% of the articles in The Monthly, an Australian magazine, were written by women. Counting only “major” articles, defined as those longer than 3,000 words, 20% were written by women.

With a research assist from Phillip S Phogg, she then turned her attention to America, where she found that women wrote:

  • 27% of the articles in The Atlantic Monthly, and
  • 30% of the articles in the New Yorker.

(Both of those are five-issue averages.)

So, naturally, I offered to supply the relevant metrics for The Economist.

At first, I started counting the articles in our current issue by author’s sex. (You out there cannot know who the authors are, of course, because we don’t have bylines, but I have an internal list to aid me.) Then I realized that this doesn’t give a good picture, because we are too small. If one or two people are on holiday, that skews the numbers. Then a freelancer writes the odd piece; or somebody writes a big piece and a box to go with it; or several people collaborate on one story, and on and on.

So instead I counted the editorial staff, both total journalists (ie, correspondents + editors) and editors. (I defined as editors only colleagues who actually edit a section in the magazine or a part of the website, not those who have editor as part of their title on their business card.)

Here is what I found:

Of the 84 journalists (I tried to correct for those on sabbatical, those half-retired, and so forth) 19, or 23%, are women.

Perhaps more interesting: Of the 21 editors, 8 are women, or 38%.

In other words, those women who do work at The Economist have twice the chance to become an editor that men at The Economist have. Innaresting, ain’t it?

And if I had excluded the website from the numbers and counted only the magazine, the share of women would have gone up both among total journalists and editors.

That said, the percentages are still well below 50%.

Now, I quite like something that Solid Gold Creativity said in her comments:

… I’m not so interested in the “reasons” for this absence of female thinkers/writers. I can always think up a hundred reasons why something is one way or another. My interest is not “why”; my interest is what’s so…

In that spirit, let’s find out more…


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California: inmates (voters) run the asylum

The World in 2010, our (ie, The Economist‘s) annual sister publication, is now out. This is a magazine in which we and our invited guests take shots at prognosticating the coming year.

My piece is this one on the Constitutional Convention that California is all but certain to call in 2010.

For you regular readers, this (ie, other constitutional conventions) is what I was researching in September when I eulogized James Madison.

On a more general note: Those of you who go to The Economist‘s website a lot might already have started noticing some changes. There will be more over the coming month or so. These changes have been long in the making and were partially cooked up at our powwow last year.

One great thing is that, even though much of the site will be behind a subscriber wall, all incoming links will in future take you directly to the article, whether or not you are a paying subscriber. This means I can keep sending you there. 😉


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Stupid yoga, smart yoga, and life

David Williams, 1970s

That’s David Williams, who went to India in the 1970s and met Pattabhi Jois, becoming the first non-Indian to learn Jois’ entire system of asanas (postures), now called Ashtanga.

Today he lives in Maui, halfway up to its spectacular volcanic crater, and that’s where my wife and I caught up with him a few years ago. We were in Maui and called him. He said ‘come over’. We went to his house. He showed us some pictures of himself in pretzel positions during the 1970s and 80s.

Then he chased out his three Bernese mountain dogs and we threw down our mats in his garage, where he taught us Ashtanga yoga for the next couple of hours. Later, we went to get some Vietnamese food and heard his yarns from yonder.

He told us a lot that day that my wife and I still talk about. With his thick Carolinian drawl, David is simultaneously wise and funny. One issue that he has strong opinions about is hurting yourself.

Western yogis today–the kind you see with tight Prana pants stretched around their firm buttocks, mat under one arm, Starbucks Venti Latte in the other–hurt themselves a lot. All the time, in fact. I have hurt myself.

‘Of course,’ you say. ‘Yoga is stretching, so sometimes you overdo it and hurt yourself.’

Wrong!

As David put it to us: If you went to a ‘real’ yogi on some Himalayan mountain top and told him that you had injured yourself, he would not understand. He would look at you as though you were crazy. It would sound as stupid to him as it would sound to your pastor if you told him that you had hurt yourself praying.

The dumbest and most dangerous “yogi” in the world

Which brings me to this article in the New York Times about “yoga competitions” and to a man named Bikram Choudhury. I wrote about Bikram in The Economist a few years ago, but that was in the Business section and I had to give it that kind of slant. Today, let’s talk about something more important.

Bikram is an extremely smart businessman–he has made Bikram, a specific series of asanas in a hot room, into a big brand.

He is also an unbelievably stupid and dangerous “yogi”. He’s not a Yogi at all, really. And you need look no further than this nonsense about ‘yoga competitions’, which–surprise!–was his idea. He and his wife want to make yoga an Olympic sport, in fact.

Introducing: Satya and Ahimsa

As regular readers of The Hannibal Blog may remember, yoga is really about stilling your mind, as Patanjali described it.

Yes, in order to do that, you might want to prepare yourself physically–ie, with asanas–because, as the Roman poet Juvenal said, mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body. But you want to spend just as much time and effort on the other seven of the eight limbs (= Asht-anga) of yoga.

The first, and most urgent, of these limbs is yama, or ethical guidelines. And two of these are:

  • satya, truthfulness, and
  • ahimsa, non-violence.

Now let me explain to you what, for most people, happens in the first five minutes in a Western yoga studio:

  1. They look around at all the other, fitter, slimmer, lither bodies and get competitive. Their ego (one of the naughty things that Patanjali warned us about) flares up. They lie to themselves: ‘I can do what he can do; I can get into Lotus.’ By lying, they have already dropped satya, and are thus no longer eligible to move on to a higher limb such as asana. They should really leave the room.
  2. Having lied to themselves (and the others in the room), they now become violent toward their own bodies. They pull, push … and hurt. Thus they have dropped ahimsa as well. Now they really should leave the room. But they never do, because everyone else is doing the same thing.

Back to David…

So save yourself some time, money and above all hurt and ignore Bikram. Please.

Instead, find yourself a real yogi, such as David.

When my wife and I met David, he no longer looked like the dude in the 1970s picture above. He looks like a middle-aged guy with long hair–less boring but otherwise as physically imperfect as the average guy his age. And yet (why “yet”?), he loves yoga as much as ever. That’s because he decided years ago that stretching is not what yoga is about.

He wrote an open letter about it. He begins:

… First, and foremost, I hope you can learn from me that in your practice, “If it hurts, you are doing it wrong.”…

Eventually, he gets to this issue of competition (or even comparison):

…I am occasionally asked if someone is “good at Yoga.” I quickly respond that the best Yogi is not the one who is most flexible, but the one who is most focused on what he or she is doing… It is with some sadness that I have observed people “competing with their Yoga practice.”…

After all, he continues, what good is yoga is you only do it while you’re young and fit–ie, “good”–and then stop when you get older and stiffer?

… The key is being able to continue practicing Yoga for the rest of your life. … those who continue are the ones who are able to figure out how to make it enjoyable… The others, consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously, quit practicing. It is my goal to do everything I can to inspire you to establish your Yoga practice not just for the few days we are together, but for the rest of your life….

…My goal is to convey the idea that the greatest Yogi is the one who enjoys his or her Yoga practice the most, not the one who can achieve the ultimate pretzel position… what is really important is what is invisible to the observer, what is within each of you….

… and onward to life

Now take everything that David and I have said above and replace the word yoga with … whatever you please.

How about sex? Do you ruin your enjoyment of it by competing or comparing yourself? Do you sacrifice satya and ahimsa to pretend that you’re a superwoman/superman? Do you “quit”, or want to quit, when you get older and less responsive?

How about friendship? Are you competing with others and comparing yourself based on how popular you are? Are you investing in acquaintances merely to nurse your “network”, even at the expense of other, real, friendships?

How about… [insert whatever is on your mind]

If that sounds familiar, you have sacrificed satya and ahimsa and are not ready to move on to the higher stages of being alive (= yoga). When you rediscover satya and ahimsa, in a garage in Maui or wherever else, you remember what you’ve been missing.

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The White Rose: German heroes

In a recent conversation, I brought up the White Rose–die Weiße Rose–and was reminded that most of you (being Anglophone) have probably never heard of them. But you must know them. Now you will.

They were a smallish group of students and one professor at the University of Munich during the Nazi era who defied and spoke out against the Nazi horrors. The middle petals of the Rose were Hans Scholl (above left) and his sister Sophie (middle) and their friend Christoph Probst (right). The group lasted less than a year until, in 1943, they were caught, “tried” and beheaded.

This summary does not do justice to them, however. They are, to me and to all post-war Germans, synonyms for goodness, courage, humanity. They are romantic, having lived Bohemian lives of pipes and poetry. They saw crimes against humanity and resisted, knowing that this would cost them their lives. At a time when conformity turned an entire nation into a murderous mob, they remained individualists, becoming heroes of all mankind.

The Leaflets

Alexander Schmorell

The Geschwister Scholl (siblings Scholl) and their friends watched with increasing horror what the Nazis said and did in the 1930s and early 40s. Then Hans Scholl and his friends Alexander Schmorell und Willi Graf were sent (nobody had a choice) to the eastern front in 1942 where they witnessed German atrocities in Poland and either saw or heard about the Warsaw Ghetto. Many Germans soldiers did, but these three were different: They decided not to stay silent but to fight the evil, which was their own regime.

Hans Scholl

They returned to Munich, where Sophie, Hans’ younger sister had moved to study biology and philosophy. She became friends with Hans’ friends. Never knowing whom they could trust, they formed their group, printing leaflets in secret back rooms and sending them by mail all over Germany.

They managed to print only about 100 copies of the first leaflet. (You can read an English translation of all six leaflets here, but I’ve chosen excerpts from the German and translated them in my words. Pictures courtesy of the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand):

Willi Graf

… Is it not true that every honest German today is ashamed of his government? And who among us can even guess the extent …?

… If the Germans, without any remaining individuality, have indeed become a heartless and cowardly mob, yes, then they deserve to perish…

Goethe talks about the Germans as a tragic people, like the Jews and Greeks, but today it seems that the Germans are a shallow, mindless herd of followers (Mitläufern) whose marrow has been sucked out and who, bereft of their core, allow themselves to be led into their extinction. It seems so, but it is not so; instead, each individual–after slow, insidious, and systematic rape–has been put into a moral prison, and only once he was captive did he become aware of his dilemma. Few understood the the menace, and their reward was death….

Each individual, as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must therefore rise up in this final hour and resist, as much as he can, against this scourge on humanity, against Fascism and every system like it. Resist passively, resist, resist wherever you are … Never forget that each people gets the government it deserves…

Christoph Probst

They then quoted Friedrich Schiller talking about Lycurgus and Solon (ie, ancient Greece) and Goethe, clearly reminding their readers of the previous heights of their civilization, the starker to contrast it with its present lows.

In the second leaflet, they begin to inform the Germans of what they had seen on the eastern front, so that none might later say (as many would) that they “didn’t know”:

… the fact that, since the conquest of Poland, three-hundred-thousand Jews have been murdered in a bestial way. Here we see the most dreadful crime against the dignity of man, a crime that compares to no other in the entire history of mankind…

… Nobody can pretend he was not guilty. Everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty! But it is not yet too late to wipe this ugliest monstrosity of a government off the face of the earth, in order not to become even more guilty….

.. the only and highest duty, indeed the holiest duty, of each German is to eradicate these [Nazi] beasts….

They then quoted Laozi and closed with an exhortation to copy the flyer as many times as possible and to distribute it (in effect, demanding martyrdom from each reader).

In the third leaflet, they exhort:

… The foremost concern of every German must not be the military victory over Bolshevism but the defeat of the National Socialists ….

before describing how people should resist:

… Sabotage of the military-industrial complex; sabotage in all Nazi gatherings, rallies, festivities, organizations…. Sabotage of all scientific pursuits to further the war, whether in universities, laboratories, research institutes … Sabotage of all Fascist cultural events…. Sabotage of all the arts that serve National Socialism. Sabotage of all writings and newspapers in league with National Socialism….

They ended by quoting Aristotle on the subject of tyranny and again exhorted readers to copy and distribute.

Sophie Scholl

From the fourth leaflet:

… Every word that comes out of Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace he means war, when he says the name of the almighty he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the stinking throat of hell…

They also assured readers that they took addresses randomly from phone books and did not write them down anywhere, then ended with:

… We will not be silent, we are your bad conscience; the White Rose will not leave you alone! Please copy and spread.

In the fifth leaflet:

… Are we to be a people forever hated and outcast by the world? No! Therefore resist these Nazi subhumans! Prove with your deeds that you think different!

They end with an amazingly prescient vision of post-war Germany and Europe, predicting a federalist Germany, a unified and peaceful Europe, and freedoms of association, speech and press.

In early 1943, after the German army was wiped out at Stalingrad, they produced their sixth and final leaflet, with their biggest print run yet–about 3,000 copies. They again mailed it all over Germany.

… Freedom and Honor! For ten years, Hitler and his thugs have twisted, raped, perverted these two beautiful German words…. They have shown what freedom and honor mean to them by destroying, throughout the past ten years, all material and spiritual freedom, all morality in the German people….

This time they went further. For three nights, they stealthily went out and painted the walls of the university quarter: “Down with Hitler!” “Freedom!”

Then Hans and Sophie (whom Hans had tried to keep out of the group in order to protect her but who had become passionately involved) decided to carry stacks of leaflets into the university to distribute them while lectures were in progress. This was reckless and the other members did not know about it.

Hans and Sophie stuffed a big suitcase full of leaflets, took it to the university and put stacks on window sills and in front of lecture halls. Just as the bell rang and students were about to spill out, they threw a big pile from the very top of a staircase into the light-filled atrium (where they are immortalized today, see left). A janitor saw them and alerted the Gestapo.

The guillotine

Four days later, Hans, Sophie and Christoph were “tried”. Hans and Sophie asked that Christoph be spared because he was married. The request was denied. On the same day the guillotine fell on their young necks.

Hans was 24 years old; Christoph 23; Sophie 21.

Their houses were searched and letters and addresses discovered. Soon after, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf, as well as their professor, Kurt Huber, were also caught and beheaded. Alexander and Willi were 25; Professor Huber almost 50.

Just before Hans was brought to the guillotine, he yelled out of his cell, echoing through the walls of the prison:

Long live freedom!


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The author’s mind during Erholung

photo

By the way, if The Hannibal Blog‘s intellect has seemed to you a bit less incisive than usual in the past week, it’s because its author is on holiday. Really on holiday, for the first time in two years or so.

(Lately, I’ve taken “vacations” mainly to write my book, so they were not “real”.)

A German word comes to mind:

Erholung

It’s one of those words that have no direct translation. Er- is a syllable that can mean re-; holen means bring. So Erholen means something like bring back. It contains re-juvenation, re-laxation, re-generation and a few other re’s.

Usually, I restrict myself to an average of 30 minutes a day on this blog (writing and/or answering comments). But during this vacation I’ve cut that to 15 minutes a day, giving my wee’uns dibs on my time (or just staring at palms trees, which have a magical effect on me.)

My mind has become temporarily empty, as during deep sleep or coma. I choose to assume that this is prologue to a sort of rapid-eye-movement response as I re-emerge, and then to energetic, take-no-prisoners mental ferocity. 😉


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Disruptive innovation (1): Cézanne

Paul_Cezanne

I ended my post on Clay Christensen’s idea of disruptive innovation in business with a promise (threat?) to try to extend the concept to other spheres of life. The purpose of this little exercise–as with almost anything on The Hannibal Blog–is to test this idea. In other words: If Christensen’s idea is profound (as opposed to banal, as many of you seem to think, based your comments) it must be extensible, so let’s see whether it is.

Attempt Number 1: Context = Art; Example = Paul Cézanne

Here is how I would write a biography of Cézanne using (in green italics) concepts from Christensen’s theory:

I) The incumbent

The incumbent during the nineteenth century, especially in France, was the mostly neoclassical art establishment. Conservative, staid, rigid, it demanded high and traditionally-defined technical mastery from artists:

  • The improvement trajectory of art was to paint/sculpt the same old subjects (Rome/Greece, Virgin Mary etc, flower vases, hunts….) in the same style but with ever more skill.
  • The intended market was that of existing art connoisseurs (gallery goers, critics, the nobility).
  • If we were to choose an institution to represent this establishment, we would pick the Paris Salon, an exhibition by the Académie des beaux-arts whose gate-keepers were a jury of art snobs.

II) The disruptor

One group of hirsute and rebellious young men finally said the obvious: that this art establishment was boring and served only the twisted standards and tastes of a small circle of snobs. They told that establishment to go to Hell and painted in a different style. The incumbent considered it less technically accomplished and either ignored or insulted it, dubbing it, derisively, impressionism.

One man, so loosely affiliated with this “group” that he did not even consider himself to be part of it, was Paul Cézanne. Cézanne was not obviously gifted at painting in a technical sense (his best friend, Émile Zola, was far better at drawing, which was all the more infuriating since Zola did not even take this talent very seriously because he wanted to be, and became, a writer instead). But Cézanne pressed on:

  • He embarked on his own improvement trajectory, beginning with incredibly simple subjects–for example, the same house in the sun of Provence, over and over again–and gradually, over the course of an entire life time, became better.
  • His market, if he thought about it all, was that of non-consumers: all those people, from his friends to ordinary folks, who did not necessarily visit the Paris Salon, or any museum, who did not care whether this artist was technically superior to that artist, who just looked at something and said Ahhhh.
  • The incumbent, seeing that Cézanne was technically inferior, ignored him. Year after year, Cézanne submitted his canvases to the Paris Salon, and year after year the jury rejected him. Cézanne instead hung his paintings in the ironically-named Salon des Refusés.
  • Over time, however, Cézanne became good enough (technically speaking), while staying original and simple, so that, his market of previous non-consumers swelled and eventually embraced the market of previous consumers, ie those who had once paid attention only to the art sanctioned by the Paris Salon but now decided that Cézanne was worth a look.
  • At this point the disruption occurs. The Paris Salon belatedly recognizes Cézanne, but hardly anybody even cares any longer. A new generation of artists now looks to Cézanne, not Neoclassicism, for inspiration. Cézanne’s rebellion and authenticity become the “new normal” and a century of permanent revolution in art begins. Pablo Picasso calls Cézanne “the father of us all”. Cubism, Expressionism, and all their descendants acknowledge their debt to Cézanne.
  • Cézanne thus becomes the incumbent, even as Picasso and others are already beginning their new round of disruption.


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250 words is the soul of wit

Polonius

Polonius

From time to time, I recall Matt Mullenweg’s casual aside that the

average number of words per post is almost always exactly 250.

That number is so small! My average post is perhaps 600 or 800 words long. Perhaps it’s habit: that is the length of most articles in The Economist.

Still, the fact that the average is so stable fascinates me–just as the remarkably stable number of members in the social groupings of primates fascinates me. It suggests that perhaps there is an optimal length for this medium (ie, blogging).

Readers of blogs don’t expect essays. They expect short, bite-sized nibbles, somewhere between the thought fragments on Twitter and the polished articles in a magazine.

Or perhaps 250 words is simply what fits onto one screen on most laptops and browsers, and blog readers don’t expect to have to scroll down.

In any event, I (who have written a 110,000-word book and think nothing of reading 500-page books) have discovered that I find it difficult to get through long blog posts. They tire me out. And I have noticed the irony that when I last opined on length, as opposed to depth, in writing, it took me 1,008 words to praise… brevity!

Polonius, the father of Ophelia and Laertes in Hamlet, did it better, of course:

brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes.

So I’ll try to keep my posts shorter. This one, as you may have guessed, is exactly 250 words long.

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Success, then disruption, then failure

Clay Christensen

You can be too good at something, too successful, so that somebody else, an upstart, undercuts and topples you, turning your success into failure. That’s because of a fundamental asymmetry between your view of the world and your upstart’s. And it makes you vulnerable.

It should be immediately obvious how this notion relates to Kipling’s idea that triumph and disaster can be impostors, which is also the idea that my forthcoming book is based on.

But the idea comes not from the worlds of philosophy or psychology, but from the world of business, which I usually consider unbearably boring and banal. (If it surprises you that a correspondent for The Economist, who has written a lot about business, would say such a thing, well, there it is. I said it.)

That said, we have already discovered that conductors can teach us about leadership and that Rembrandt can teach us about good writing. So why shouldn’t a Harvard Business School professor have something to teach us about life?

The professor is Clay Christensen, and IMHO he is the only business writer who has ever written a book that is not painfully obvious and banal but simple and profound. He doesn’t quite make it into my pantheon of great thinkers, but almost.

Disruption

The term he coined in his most important book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, is disruptive innovation. He explains it in this video.

What Christensen observed in one industry after another is, first, an incumbent. That is the most successful company in the industry, the leader. This company improves, year after year, by adding features to its products and listening to its best customers and meeting their demands. At some point, however, this company’s products get so good that they are more than good enough for most people, and too complex or expensive for the least demanding consumers, or people who don’t even use the product at all yet.

Eventually, Christensen observed, a disruptor comes along. This is a scrappy new company, not worth the attention of the incumbent. It makes products that are clearly “inferior” to the incumbent’s products. They are more basic, simpler, cheaper.

For precisely those reasons, the disruptor will have different customers than the incumbent. The demanding customers stay with the incumbent, whereas people who never used the product at all, or who used it very little, will try out the disruptor’s products.

The incumbent will thus not only shrug at the disruptor but enjoy his presence. That is because the incumbent can now shed the low-value customers and serve only the most demanding customers, charging them more and making more profits. Things seem to be going better than ever.

The disruptor is also enjoying himself. He is not, at first, competing with the incumbent at all, but aiming at people the incumbent never served. He sees the world in a different way. A small new market, with tiny revenues, looks fantastic to the disruptor, whereas it would make the incumbent yawn. This is the asymmetry in worldview.

But something else is going on, unnoticed: All the while, the disruptor, too, is making improvements. And at some point the products of the disrupter become good enough for everybody. This is when the impostor drops his guise.

The high-end customers suddenly start wondering why they have been paying for all those strange features they never use anyway. They defect. The incumbent is toppled and falls. The disruptor takes its place. It becomes a new incumbent, until it, too, is disrupted.

An example

Christensen gives great examples from business history in his book, but let’s take one that, in a different context, The Hannibal Blog mentioned just the other day: cloud computing.

  • Incumbents: Microsoft (Windows + Word, Excel, Powerpoint); Apple (fancy, snazzy laptops and such)
  • Disruptor: Google and many smaller companies (WordPress included) that provide free or cheap services over the internet.

For years, Microsoft “improved” Word (to take just that example) by adding features, then made us pay more moolah to install a new version. Microsoft was listening to its most demanding customers–the ones who, say, pretended to need a multi-color, rotating, animated table in their letterhead.

The rest of us hated Word because we just wanted a clean white page that does not disappear every time a laptop breaks. Most of the rest of us (the young and indigent, the poor in Latin America, Asia and Africa) could not afford Word at all, and so we did not use it.

Along comes Cloud Computing. You can now type, save and share simple text documents on the internet, free. This has advantages: several of you, in different places, can work on the same document at the same time. You can access the document from any phone or computer. If your computer breaks, you no longer care.

It also has “disadvantages”: You cannot get that multi-color, rotating, animated table in your letterhead. (More seriously, I could not write my book on Google Docs because it does not support endnotes yet.)

But who cares? Almost nobody, it turns out. So, right now, the poor, the savvy, the un-demanding are the ones using Google Docs most. The suits are still using Word.

Wait a few more years (months?). Then Word as we know it will disappear.

Enough business, back to life!

That is the most I have ever talked about business in my private life, and I feel so yucky that I might have to take a shower. But I was just setting up a different point: Why should Christensen’s insight not apply to … art, science, sports, love and life?

As I write this, I am coming up with examples from all these spheres of life. In due course I will accost you with them. But in the mean time, please feel free to suggest your own in the comments.

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