Your hard-working IdeaFlow bloggers have been having a little off-blog conversation about Clayton Christensen’s long-awaited new book The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (co-authored with Michael E. Raynor). Our conversation went something like this:

Renee: I've got the new Clayton Christensen…Anybody seen it? I'll be posting on it soon, so if you've read it or know the authors, feel free to weigh in.

Joyce: Renee, I'm in the process of digesting and figuring out how to share info about Innovator's Solution ... which I think is MUST reading ... however, it will probably also be fairly overwhelming to most folks because it has so much counterintuitive material ... and there's so much that could only be implemented or changed at very senior levels.

Leslie: Joyce, I agree with you that so much can only be implemented at very senior levels. It was interesting to me to see that, a year ago, a lot of the engineers at Dell were reading Innovator's Dilemma. And yet, at Dell, the innovation is in the supply chain and the manufacturing, not in the software and hardware that goes out the door (these were software engineers). Those folks certainly did face a dilemma. They could not do anything about what they could see.

John: Yeah, totally.

How do I love this book? Let me count the ways: the carefully rendered statement of the thesis, the placement of the starting point for the argument -- and, oh boy, the footnotes!

It begins, of course, with the now-familiar Innovator’s Dilemma: Once a company matures, growth through innovation is a very risky undertaking at which few companies succeed – because the very fact that the strategies used to run a successful, mature company are wildly at odds with the strategies needed to sustain disruptive innovation.

Pretty quickly Christensen dispenses with the top two reasons for this failure – bad management, risk-averse management – and zeroes in on this one: the widely held belief that growth is so hard to achieve “repeatedly and well” because “creating new-growth businesses is simply unpredictable.” The process, he says, looks unpredictable because its results are unpredictable. But “you cannot say, just by looking at the results of the process, whether the process that created those results is capable of generating predictable output. You must understand the process itself.” And predictability, he explains, comes from well-researched theory.

In effect he’s starting out 10 paces behind where most business books start. He’s laying out all the basis on which he’s going to build a theory, not just laying out a theory. And these couple of pages that expound on what makes a theory good and solid are written so elegantly that, like the rest of the chapter, they seem almost buoyant, not nearly as weighty as it sounds when I describe it.

This elegance I attribute partly to the skillful use of footnotes (actually, they are chapter endnotes). These are big, solid, meaty footnotes, filled with arguments that if put in the chapter itself would just bog it down. Yet they are there at the end of the chapter if you want them.

The endnotes are well worth the time it takes to read them. They go off in fascinating directions – reasoned criticism of management research, a collection of references to articles and books on theory-building, a short discourse on the need for anomaly-seeking (as opposed to anomaly-avoiding) research.

I half expected that note to include a reference to Heidegger’s Being and Time (“when something is unusable for some purpose, then the assignment becomes explicit”). Or to semiotics – after all, an anomaly – phenomena the existing theory cannot explain -- could be considered a break in the “code” (the theory). And to a semiotician it is the places where the code breaks in which the meaning of the code itself is laid bare.

So maybe this is going to turn out to be a semiotics of innovation? I suspect not, but it was fun to sit back after reading Chapter One and spend a little time sipping green tea and meditating on the logical difference between correlation and causality. And looking forward to the next chapter.