In his new book, “Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World” (11 innovations that shaped our modern world) (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025), Scott D. Anthony analyzes how disruptive innovations – including iPhone, transistor and disposable diapers – transformed industries and transforms and industries and transform industries and transforms industries and societies. Here is an adapted excerpt from the chapter on the famous chef and TV host Julia Child, who died in 2014:
Close your eyes and think of someone who has launched a disruptive innovation that changed the world. You are likely to have imagined someone like Jensen Huang from Nvidia or Sam Altman from OpenAi. Or, if you are more inclined to history, you might have had a vision of Henry Ford and your T model, or even turned even more in time, for Johannes Gutenberg and its typographic press.
Read too:
Free tool
XP Simulator
Learn in 1 minute how much your money can yield
All are fair choices, but disruptive innovators come in many different forms and flavors. For example, get any cookbook. Open it. Note how it is willing. You will probably see two columns, with the ingredients and equipment on the left side of the page and the right instructions. That’s how the cookbooks are arranged, right?
More or less. Recipe books are arranged in this way because at some specific time, some specific person thought this layout would make more sense. She experienced and found that the idea connected with readers. Other authors mimicked her. And it became the pattern.
This specific person was Julia Child.
Continues after advertising
It is presented in my book “Epic Disrupted”. What exactly did she break? Let’s say you lived in the suburbs of the United States in the 1950s. What would you do if you wanted to taste great French food?
One option would be to drive to the nearest city and expect to find a reasonable restaurant. If, however, you wanted to be sure of enjoying a great French food, you would have to buy a plane ticket and fly to France.
In 1951, the same year Julia Child failed her final exam at Le Cordon Bleu (she spent on the second attempt), she met Simone Beck Fischbacher and Louisette Bertholle.
Continues after advertising
Fischbacher and Bertholle were working on a French recipe book for an American audience. His publisher thought they needed someone with a more authentic American voice. Child agreed to join the effort.
Ten years later, the trio launched “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. “The recipes are glorious, either for a simple egg or a fish souffle,” wrote Craig Claiborne from “The New York Times.” “At first glance, it is conservatively estimated that there are a thousand or more recipes in the book. All are meticulously edited and written as if each were a masterpiece, and most of them are.”
The book made it simple and accessible for people to cook great French food in their own kitchen. This is classic disruptive innovation.
Continues after advertising
The five disruptive behaviors
Throughout his illustrious career, Child has demonstrated the behaviors that serve as ingredients of the success of disruption.
1. Obsession by the customer
Layout with side -by -side ingredients and instructions is an excellent example of how Child was obsessed with the customer. She always saw the world through the eyes of her readers, ensuring that she used ingredients that they could access and write in terms that they could understand.
Continues after advertising
When shopping at stores where her customers bought and cook using their ingredients, she learned that US veal was less soft than the French veal, her turkeys were bigger, and the Americans ate more broccoli than the French. Following Child’s footsteps is as simple as spending more time with customers, seeking to understand them better than themselves.
2. Curiosity
Child was curious to the point of obsession. In 1953, she was researching fish recipes and found a subtle but critical challenge. There are 32,000 different fish species in the world, and the original recipe fish can be confused.
Continues after advertising
For example, a French recipe book may refer to Le Carrelet. British English translates this to Place. But American English translates to Sand Dab, Lemon Dab or Lemon Sole (Types of Linguado and Sole).
Translating DAB into an English-French dictionary would return Carrelet, but also Limande, Calimande and Plie. The wrong translation could lead to results below ideal, impacting Child’s desire to allow people to reproduce refined French cuisine in their kitchens.
Child resorted to French-English dictionaries and books, including one with a 26 pages of French fish and their American equivalents. She also wrote to French and American experts, including those in government departments.
She observed in her memories that she received “hills and hills of information, everything you wanted to know about fish, but I was afraid to ask, which firm flesh, which were soft, which were salt water, which were fresh.” In the end, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” had a 27 -page chapter dedicated to fish with 20 other recipes scattered around the book.
The path to innovation always begins with a question. Why is it done that way? How could we do it differently? Great innovatives like Child question the status quo, looking for different and better ways to do things.
3. Collaboration
Child collaborated widely, working with several chefs in his long career. She has always sought to learn from specific techniques experts and brought her own perspective to these collaborations, generating innovative ideas.
One of the greatest myths of innovation is the idea of the lone inventor. Such a creature never existed. Innovation requires a team, a village, a legion. Great innovators recognize one of the most persistent discoveries of innovation literature – magic happens in intersections, where Mindsets and skills collide.
Going to intersections can be as simple as taking magazines from different fields or asking AI to take a different persona. It is a simple way to make magic happen.
4. Willingness to experiment
Child was a master in experimentation. Although there were about 1,000 recipes in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”, a remarkable absence was French bread. The challenge was that the creation of a distinct crispness of a baguette seemed to demand the special oven of a French boulangerie.
In what she called “a great experiment of French bread,” Child and her husband Paul tested more than 30 different approaches before determining that he drops a brick, stone, or head of hot metal ax (if you had one nearby) in a pan of cold water at the bottom of the oven created a wonderfully effective vapor breath.
Child shows how the key to experimentation is to remember that there is no failure when you didn’t know and couldn’t know the answer beforehand. There is only learning.
5. Persistence
Finally, Child persisted in setbacks and difficulties. For example, she, Beck, and Bertholder signed a contract in 1952 with the House Mifflin to produce the book. In 1958, the Highton Mifflin said the 700 pages that covered only sauces and birds were too much and asked for a simpler and more concise book.
Child and co -authors rewritten the book. Eighteen months later, despite calling the book “Culinary Art”, Hoket Mifflin’s chief editor Paul Brooks said he was still very dense and complicated, and refused to publish it. Fortunately, Child’s friend Avis Devoto connected the authors to Judy Jones to Alfred Knopf and, two years later, the book was released and was a resounding success.
Child demonstrated what Carol Dweck, Stanford, calls growth mindset. She saw the setbacks neither as permanent nor as things that revealed personal limitations. Instead, she saw them like steps on the way to success.
“Mastering the Art of French Cooking” was just the beginning for Child. She wrote a dozen other recipe books and became a television star with her show, The French Chef. In all this, she sought to make good cooking accessible to a wider population.
“No one is born a big cook,” she wrote in her memories. “Learn by doing. This is my invariable advice for people: learn to cook-try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, and, above all, have fun!”
Child -followed behaviors are not particularly difficult. Curiosity, trial experimentation and error and willingness to persevere even in failure are common among children. It all comes down to having the right mindset.
The legendary disruptive innovative Steve Jobs put well when he said, “Everything around you you call ‘life’ was done by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. After you learn it, you will never be the same.”
In essence, great disruptive innovators are like you and you.
The musical Back to the Future had a captivating song titled “For the Dreamers” (for dreamers), who “never stop believing / a grain of sand becomes a pearl / A great idea can change the world / They can see what others don’t see / try things others wouldn’t try.”
Try a little disruptive dream. Ask questions. Look at the world through the eyes of its potential customers. Run an experiment. Try again if it doesn’t work. It sounds so modest, but these are the ingredients that change the world.
c.2025 Harvard Business Review. Distribuído pela New York Times Licensing.
