About

We are a small firm with a narrow specialty — and that is the point.

Disruptive Strategies exists to bring rigorous, theory-driven thinking to the question every executive eventually faces: what do we do about the change we cannot see clearly yet?

Origin

Built on four decades of disruption research

The intellectual foundation of our work is the body of research developed by the late Clayton M. Christensen at Harvard Business School — beginning with The Innovator's Dilemma in 1997 and extending through the jobs-to-be-done framework, modularity theory, and the resource-process-values lens.

We are not affiliated with Professor Christensen, his estate, or the Christensen Institute. We are practitioners who have spent our careers applying his frameworks inside operating companies — and adapting them when the world they describe has moved on.

1997

The year disruption stopped being a metaphor and started being a theory you could test.

How we think

Five principles that shape every engagement

1. Theory beats benchmarks

What competitors do is data; why they do it is theory. We bias toward understanding the causal mechanism so the recommendation still holds when conditions change.

2. The right answer is usually unpopular

If our recommendation matches what the leadership team already believes, we have probably failed. Useful work creates discomfort before it creates clarity.

3. The customer's job, not the customer's persona

Demographics describe who buys; jobs describe why. The latter predicts substitution. The former does not.

4. Capability is a bigger constraint than capital

Most disruption fails inside incumbents not because the strategy was wrong, but because the host organization's processes and values quietly reject it.

5. We earn out before we scale up

We work in narrow, sequenced engagements rather than open-ended retainers. If our work has not paid for itself by month three, we are doing it wrong.

6. Independence is non-negotiable

We do not take success fees, equity in client companies, or referral commissions from technology vendors. The only person we work for in the room is the person paying the invoice.

The team

Senior practitioners only

Every engagement is led — not just supervised — by a partner with at least fifteen years of operating or advisory experience in the relevant industry. We do not pyramid.

EM

Elena Marsh

Founding Partner

Two decades leading corporate strategy inside industrials and life sciences. Former director of strategy at a Fortune 200 medical devices firm.

DK

Daniel Kwon

Partner, Growth

Built two new ventures inside large companies and one outside. Specialty: standing up autonomous business units that survive contact with the core.

RA

Rohan Anand

Partner, Research

Quantitative strategist. Leads our jobs-to-be-done research practice and the firm's proprietary diagnostic library.

— Names above are placeholders to illustrate layout; replace with your team. —

Want to put one of our partners on a problem?

The fastest route to a useful conversation is a short note describing where you are and what is on the table.