In late January Kara Swisher paid tribute to Clay Christensen, who died that month at age 67. Christensen was a Harvard professor of management whose seminal book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” appeared in 1997. His ideas on “disruptive” technologies influenced the founders of many legendary startups in Silicon Valley.
Swisher writes that Professor Christensen’s innovative thinking “took a turn for the worse in tech.”
Silicon Valley failed to marry disruption with a concept of corporate responsibility, and growth at all costs became its motto.
Swisher sees the notion of destructive innovation crystallized in Facebook’s famous slogan: “Move Fast and Break Things.”
I have always wondered why the company chose those words. I have no problem with “move fast,” which Professor Christensen would not have quibbled with, since being nimble was a core competency that he touted. It was the word “break” that stuck in my head like a bad migraine.
Why use a violent and thoughtless word like “break” and not one more hopeful, like “change” or “transform” or “invent”? And, if “break” was to be the choice, what would happen after the breaking? Would there be fixing? Could there be any fixing after the breaking? “Break” sounded painful.
Christensen could inspire with snappy quotables. Swisher cites these:
“It’s easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.”
“Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”
(Kara Swisher, “Tech Loses a Prophet. Just When It Needs One,” NYTimes, 1-29-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
Gladys Nilsson
You and Jim [Nutt] have a significant collection of work by self-taught artists, such as Martín Ramírez and Joseph Yoakum. What draws you to that kind of work?
The work that interests me is by people who have a need to explain or explore or put down what they have to get out. They aren’t stopping because they don’t have formal training. They’re following their thread without worrying about it.
(Jonathan Griffin, “She Painted With the Hairy Who. Now She’s Going Big, at 79,” NYTimes, 1-30-20)
The above response by Nilsson to the question posed is profoundly uninformative, and therein lies its charm.
Her psychedelic, cartoonish paintings grow on me entertainingly. In this one I enjoy how the two men hold the canvas for the naked painter as she airily attacks her picture with a hook shot. The fellows’ packages are blatantly apparent, and they watch the diva carefully, alert to her every evolving requirement.
In the following one I resonate to the bug-eyed intensity with which the puckishly enbosomed female surveys the tiny floating homo-tadpole.
Nilsson’s painting is cleanly of the sportive sort to me. I have no idea what to make of it other than as something at which to have a clean, bug-eyed look without worrying about it (as she might say).
(c) 2020 JMN