I always try to take notes as I read through a book that might have some implications for my daily work and thinking. Sometimes, however, my best intentions fall short so I thought this time around I’d post some notes and reflections online chapter by chapter. If you’d like to join me in reading this book, go ahead a order a copy. It will take me a while to work my way through it. You’ve got plenty of time.

Christensen begins the book with a rather detailed description of innovation and failure in the disk drive industry. For the same reason geneticists study fruit flies, Christensen explains that the rapid pace of change in the disk drive industry makes it an ideal test bed for studying how successful organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change. I won’t go into the details of the drive technology or the specific changes that shaped the industry over the last 30 years or so.

There are two types of technological change that matter. Christensen calls them sustaining and disrupting changes.

This study of technological change over the history of the disk drive industry revealed two types of technology change, each with very different effects on the industry’s leaders. Technologies of the first sort sustained the industry’s rate of improvements in the product performance (total capacity and recording density were the two most common measures) and ranged in difficulty from incremental to radical. The industry’s dominant firms always led in developing and adopting these technologies. By contrast, innovations of the second sort disrupted or redefined performance trajectories—and consistently resulted in the failure of the industry’s leading firms.

My first thought is that our current system of K–12 education is clearly engaged in sustaining innovation. Document cameras and PowerPoint instead of overhead projectors, for example, are basically more of the same—better performance and incremental feature enhancements—rather than truly disruptive innovation.

It turns out the disruptive innovations weren’t at all obvious if companies were concerned about what their customers wanted. In fact, the really disruptive stuff usually represents a downgrade for existing customers of the dominant firms.

Generally disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.

So the dominant firms failed not because of inferior technology; they were almost always well-managed, visionary organizations. Their problem was that one of their competitors took a new, nearly always inferior, technology and created a new market.

Rather, the 5.25-inch drive manufacturers seem to have been misled by their customers, notably IBM and its direct competitors and resellers, who themselves seemed as oblivious as Seagate to the potential benefits and possibilities of portable computing and the new disk drive architecture that might facilitate it.

It was obvious to IBM, Seagate, and their desktop computer customers that the 3.5-inch hard drives were inferior in speed, capacity, and cost. What they failed to appreciate was that customers of the emerging portable computer market were willing to sacrifice some performance for the smaller size and increased ruggedness of the new 3.5-inch drives. The disruptive innovations don’t tend to show themselves in existing markets. They enable new products and markets that the dominant firms and their customers can’t see.

But the problem established firms seem unable to confront successfully is that of downward vision and mobility, in terms of the trajectory map.

If we can draw any parallels between the hard disk industry and K–12 education—and that’s a big if—we have to ask whether there are any emerging markets that the dominant firms (our regular school districts) and their customers (students, parents, and communities) are currently undervaluing? Could it be online learning? Most school people I know consider online learning vastly inferior to traditional face-to-face learning. Perhaps the online technologies that are flourishing now and finding little traction in traditional educational institutions will eventually turn out to be the disruptive force that gives traditional schooling a run for its money (literally).

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

The NASA of today is probably at least 100× larger than the agile agency that launched those Apollo missions back in the 60′s, and, according to an article published by NPR, their bureaucracy is employing a lot of “innovation-blocking behaviors.” Not satisfied with the status quo, a veteran astronaut created a satirical video intended to call out the problems he’d been seeing at the agency. Watch this video and see if any of it rings true for you.

OK, so no one’s going to win an Oscar for their performance in this video. Here are the innovation-blocking behaviors I noted while watching the video:

• Blind adherence to existing procedures or specifications
• Compartmentalization
• Emphasis on employee roles in the organization rather than the quality of their ideas
• Fear of challenging the status quo (and those who maintain it)
• Too much reliance on the chain of command
• Tendency to “shoot the messenger”
• Premature acceptance of resource constraints
• Overly complex processes
• Too comfortable in “the comfort zone”
• Valuing process over results
• Too much emphasis on past experience

It’s easy to criticize without suggesting solutions, so I was impressed to see Part II posted 10 days ago.

I think you can summarize Part II pretty easily. Build innovation into your organization’s processes intentionally. When the innovation is “baked in” to the structure of an organization it sends a message to all employees that the organization is keenly interesting in what they have to say. And that is an crucial step in building an innovative culture.

A large majority of high school students say their class work is not very difficult, and almost two-thirds say they would work harder if courses were more demanding or interesting, according to an online nationwide survey of teenagers conducted by the National Governors Association.

Consider that and then have a listen to this interview with Thomas Friedman, author of the red-hot book “The World Is Flat,” over at NPR’s Science Friday show. Is there any question that we need to be producing the brightest minds possible? And let’s not get sidetracked by lamenting the loss of manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor markets overseas. It’s a done deal. It’s over. Get used to it. Instead, let’s focus on the kind of work that isn’t easily outsourced—the creative, right-brained work that produces innovation. Let’s ask tough questions about what kind of curriculum is needed to produce citizens that can adapt rapidly, use technology effectively, communicate convincingly, cooperate seamlessly, solve problems creatively, and think unconventionally. Somehow I don’t think it looks much like the curriculum we have now.