Amazing Disruptions: 11 New Ways That Shaped Our Modern World by Scott D. Anthony
Published September 2025
A few weeks ago, I was trying Claude Cowork. The more I integrate this platform into my daily work, the more confident I am that AI will change the way higher education work is done.
It is in this context of thinking about AI as a major disruption within the higher order that I want to discuss—and recommend—Scott Anthony’s new book, Amazing Disruptions: 11 New Ways That Shaped Our Modern World.
Full disclosure—Scott is a professor of business administration at my institution.
The Best Distractions it’s not about AI. Scott could write a book on how AI is disrupting business. His expertise in that area is widely known. Maybe I’ll be able to convince Scott to write a book about how AI can disrupt universities.
What The Best Distractions What we can do in our discussions about AI and higher ed is put this technology in a historical context. Not the history of AI; instead, it is a history of ideas, practices and changing technologies. This change can be on a scale as large as countries and world politics (guns—Chapter 1) or as small as a single industry or product (Pampers—Chapter 9).
For Scott, disruptive innovation is a subset of innovation. Where innovation creates value, disruptive innovation creates value at scale.
Examples from the book range from the introduction of the automobile assembly process (Model T—Chapter 5) to the printing press (Chapter 2) to the transistor (Chapter 6).
A disruptive innovation can make a previously expensive product affordable (McDonald’s fast food success—Chapter 8) or it can disrupt the conventional wisdom of the day (Florence Nightingale—Chapter 4).
What we learn by reading The Best Distractions that innovation is, to use Scott’s words, “predictably predictable.” Meanwhile, it is always difficult to predict whether a new service, product, method, invention or idea will rise to the level of permanently disrupting the status quo.
Where does this leave us with AI and how universities work?
In the short time I’ve been trying Claude Cowork, the platform has changed the way I do my work.
Cowork’s ability to maintain continuous context across documents, databases, websites, tools and conversations enables me to collaborate with AI on a variety of tasks.
I am old enough to have lived through the transition from pre-internet to online education life. In grad school in the early 1990s, we used computers for everything, but most of the work was done in local applications and cluster processing at the university. My graduate school days for dissertation writing were spent reading journal articles, participating in discussions, running analyzes in SPSS (as a batch job in a university mainframe using VM/CMS) and writing in Word.
These days, I look back fondly on the hours of academic work I had undivided by email, Slack, Zoom and multiple browser tabs. Today, if the campus network goes down, my academic work stops.
We seem to be entering the second phase of the higher ed career disruption. Can you do your faculty or staff work if your AI goes down? Today, it probably is. Tomorrow, maybe not so much.
Much of the discussion about AI and higher ed focuses on the technology’s impact on teaching, learning and assessment. My hypothesis is that the real change AI will bring to higher education will be found less in the classroom (digital or physical) and more in the work of people employed by colleges and universities.
Think about what a professor or an employee did day in and day out, hour in and hour out, in their jobs before there were e-mails and browsers. Now imagine what it would mean if AI tools like Claude Cowork make a new way of working in the university very different from the way we work today.
I suspect that stepping back and taking a broader (historically informed) lens on our current campus AI discussions would be wise. Campus committees thinking about AI might want to consider assigning themselves some (fun) homework.
Reading The Best Distractions won’t provide any answers about how AI will change higher education, but the book may help us decide if we’re entering campus conversations by asking the right questions.
What are you studying?
