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"Capitalism, Polman and Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the conference's organizer, wrote in an introductory essay, "has often proved dysfunctional in important ways. It often encourages shortsightedness, contributes to wide disparities between the rich and the poor, and tolerates the reckless treatment of environmental capital. If these costs cannot be controlled, support for capitalism may disappear.""

"Established companies are "held captive by their customers," in Christensen's phrase, and so routinely ignore emerging markets of buyers who are not their customers. Dominant companies prosper by making a good product and keeping their customer base by using sustaining technologies to continue improving it. The products get ever better-but at some point their quality overshoots the level of performance that even the high end of the market needs. Typically, this is when a disruptive innovation lands in the marketplace at a lower price and relatively poor level of performance-but it's a level adequate for what the lower end of the market seeks. The disruptive technology starts to attract customers, and is on its way to staggering the industry's giants. "Sustaining innovation makes good products better-but then you don't buy the old product. They're replacements. They do not create growth." To bring these powerful ideas into the real world, Christensen in 2001 founded the consulting firm Innosight (www.innosight.com) with Mark Johnson, M.B.A. '96. Now employing about 100, the company works mostly with Fortune 100 companies that are seeking to defend their core businesses and adapt to disruptive environments. It also coaches them on how to disrupt markets proactively, harnessing disruption's engine of growth for themselves. "It's hard to do both," says David Duncan, a senior partner at Innosight who earned a Harvard Ph.D. in physics in 2000. "As successful companies get bigger, their growth trajectories flatten out, and they need to find new ways to expand. But that will look different from what they did in the past. Most are so focused on maintaining their core business that when push comes to shove, the core will almost always kill off the disruptive innovation-the new thing. "The two goals conflict for resources," he continues. "CEOs are accountable to shareholders and feel Wall Street pressure to meet earnings targe

"The liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by the Great Depression, and the response was, in many respects, communitarian: the strengthening of unions, the provision of jobs and government benefits to the poor and unemployed and the creation of a safety net to provide a modicum of security. The left has, in part, shifted focus, with more stress on the values of self-expression and self-fulfillment, on individual liberation from the constraints of traditional morality, especially sexual morality - what my colleague Ross Douthat calls "The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy" or "the morality of rights." Economic liberalism - despite progress on the minimum wage - has lost salience. Instead of communitarian principles, the contemporary progressive movement - despite its advocacy of local issues like community policing - has produced a counterpart to conservative advocacy of free markets: the advocacy of personal freedom. "