What are the advantages of recombination over destruction?
The danger of creative destruction is that you start out by saying, “We’re not even going to look at the employees we have, the culture we have, the structures we have, the technologies we have. We’re just going to assume that we need to do something different, so we start by downsizing people and trying to rip up the old culture and put in a new one.” The downside of this approach is that it’s very disruptive in firms. I have a friend who had 13 bosses in two years. Every time her company made a change, there was a new boss, and every new boss had a new conception of how things should be done. So my friend had 13 episodes of creative destruction in a row. She was extremely burned out, extremely cynical, and she spent most of her time dealing with changes as opposed to working. There are a number of advantages and disadvantages to each approach. The main claim in my book is that creative destruction is greatly oversold — it’s used way too much and with not enough attention to the disru
