Clayton Christensen
For a man who specialized in describing disruption and the wrath that is invoked in large companies, it is interesting to see how warmly Clayton Christensen is remembered.
“We were heartbroken to learn today of the passing of Clayton Christensen,” said Nitin Nohria, dean of the Harvard Business School. “His loss will be felt deeply throughout our community. Clayton’s brilliance and kindness were equally evident to everyone he met, and his legacy will be long-lasting. Through his research and teaching, he fundamentally shaped the practice of business and influenced generations of students and scholars.”
His passing has invoked an outpouring of generous praise and heartfelt stories about Christensen, the thinker but perhaps more so Christensen the man. Not since Peter Drucker died has a management thinker been so warmly remembered. The difference is sadly that Drucker passed at 99, Christensen at 67.
The core of Christensen’s thinking is distilled in his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. It tells tales, and there are plenty of stories of how bottom-line, cheaply made products get into the market, and because they are adopted so readily due to cost and utility, they disrupt the giants of the industry. This effect happened in steel, disk drives, heavy equipment, and radio technologies. Christensen wondered how great companies could maintain their edge if they were consistently being undercut.
Therein the challenge, and while Christensen posed some answers, the real answer is that nothing in business, as in life, is guaranteed. You need to keep innovating if you want to succeed. “When Giants Fail” by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker paints the portrait of a man who spoke of disruption but did not do so with malice or animus. As a professor at Harvard Business School, he was tall (6'8") and courtly. With a warm smile and engaging manner, people came to him, and they listened. All the titans of tech-dom—Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Steve Jobs, Reed Hastings, Michael Bloomberg—listened to him.
“Christensen was a generous man,” wrote MacFarquhar. “He didn’t like to call people stupid, and, besides, the very same managers who were being called stupid today had been called geniuses last week, when the company was doing well and they were doing exactly what they were doing now.”
Not everyone agreed with Christensen. “There are criticisms that are very important,” Christensen told Quartz magazine. "Never does a theory just pop out in complete form. But rather, the first appearance of the theory is half-baked. Then it improves when people say, 'it doesn't account for this,' or 'this is an anomaly, and it doesn't explain that.' It's very important to have people willing to criticize it for that purpose."
Christensen was a man of deep faith. He grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and did a mission in Korea. He remained active in the LDS church for all his days. Clark Gilbert, a protégé of Christensen and now president of BYU-Pathways, told the Deseret News, who didn’t believe in God or who weren’t religious found themselves reflecting on spiritual ideas because of the conversations and writings of Clay Christensen. ‘How Will You Measure Your Life’ influenced so many people. He had this ability to unapologetically and with deep conviction and courage talk about things of faith and of God with people who didn’t think they were religious. He found ways of not only engaging them personally but engaging them intellectually in a way that caused them to start to really actually think about spiritual matters in a way that they never would have without someone like Clay.”
It was perhaps his faith that sustained Christensen in the disruptions that he endured. His health began to fail decades ago, and in 2010 he had lost the ability to speak due to a stroke. Christensen did not give up public life, however. He taught himself to speak all over again. For a storyteller, words are the essence of life and meaning, and a man who can wield words them still lives.
Fortunately, Christensen’s words live on through his books and his many recordings. His example, too, reinforces his message of resilience and struggle in the effort to achieve something better tomorrow than we can attain today.
