After all, who doesn't love disruptive innovation?
But the truth is in reality, very very few people like disruptive innovation.
Even in a highly tech centered innovative room I would venture to guess that only about 5% of the audience has what it takes to create disruptive change ?
If disruptive innovation is so great why doesn't everyone embrace it?
The reason for this is that creating disruptive innovation or change in any form is quite painful.
In a way, it requires you to make other desires subservient, at least in the short term.
First off, with disruptive change comes significant disagreement. Once you start down this path you can kiss rapport and harmony goodbye. A good organization has harmony, snacks, and family picnics... an excellent organization has PROGRESS.
I'm not saying that the excellent organizations don't have harmony and family picnics, what I'm saying is that an excellent disruptive organization will value enterprise results over any of these more subjective qualities.
What this means is that whether or not a company achieves its business goals will be a higher criteria then whether or not people in the company love each other.
These distinctions manifest themselves in every activity in the company. Assume that you are sitting in a conference room with 6 fellow employees. An excellent disruptive organization will encourage everyone to chime in and voice their opinions with minimal censorship and corporate politicking.
Here's the paradox: the most excellent disruptive organizations have individuals that value results over personal egos. To outsiders (who value ego over results), these insider conversations sound rude and unthoughtful. However, on the inside, the results oriented management team sees itself as a single unit seeking financial returns. In excellent organizations, who said what and who's original idea was presented are irrelevant and most of the time not even remembered.
This is the environment under which we see the creation of a beautiful organization, and everyone that has been part of this kind of process knows how great it can be.
In fact, to a certain extent, your co-workers in this situation become akin to comrades at war. While you might not be "best friends" with these individuals you create a level of respect and bonding that is sometimes not present in many friendships.
What's the point?
The point is that change and disruptive innovation is turbulent. It is by nature, a process that has much conflict and where difficult decisions must be made (whether explicitly or by default). A disruptive organization is not a day camp, but rather more like a military camp (with all due respect to those in the military that engage in actual combat).
I am not in a position to say that rapport and love is more or less important than creating enterprise value. All I am saying is that these two aims are often in short term conflict and that one should be aware of this as both a potential employee and entrepreneur.
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