Clayton M. Christensen in 2014 (Photo by Noam Galai/WireImage)
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who became world-famous for his book, The Innovator's Dilemma (HBR Press, 1997) and his ideas on disruptive innovation, passed away last night as a result of complications from leukemia treatment at the age of 67.
Christensen was a member of the Latter-day Saint (LDS) community for over 40 years. Unusual for the management field, Christensen held explicit moral and religious convictions. “When I have my interview with God at the end of my life, he’s not going to ask me to show how high I went in anybody’s org chart or how much money I left behind in the bank when I died,” Christensen said. “It’s actually really important you succeed at what you’re succeeding at, but that isn’t going to be the measure of life.”
As a young man, Christensen had studied economics at Brigham Young and, after a two-year leave of absence in which he served as a volunteer full-time missionary for the LDS Church, he earned a master’s degree at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and got an MBA at Harvard Business School. He then worked at Boston Consulting Group before heading back to Harvard for a Ph.D. so he could teach. Over the ensuing decades as a business school professor, Christensen wrote ten books and founded several consulting firms.
Christensen was a charismatic ambassador for his ideas and became a key influence in Silicon Valley. His fans included Apple’s Steve Jobs, Intel’s Andy Grove, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. He was repeatedly named as the world’s most influential living business thinker.
Christensen: Storyteller Extraordinaire
Yet these days, management is such a fragmented field of competing brands, “business thinker” is almost an oxymoron. Christensen made no secret of the fact that he succeeded principally by telling stories, as he explained in his 2010 Harvard Business Review article:
“Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel... Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t… I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills…. When I finished the minimill story, Grove … went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy.”
The US Steel And The Milkshake Stories
Christensen continued to tell the steel industry story and similar stories for many years after the publication of The Innovator's Dilemma. These stories enabled listeners to grasp how incumbents who neglected the lower end of their market could be disrupted by new and innovative products. His stories resonated widely as one incumbent after another — Xerox, U.S. Steel, Digital Equipment Corp, Blockbuster, Nokia, and Kodak—stumbled.
Books by Clayton Christensen
Christensen kept writing articles and books to explain his ideas further. For instance. Disrupting Class (McGraw Hill Education, 2008) looks at the root causes of why schools struggle, while The Innovator's Prescription (McGraw Hill Education, 2009) examines the American healthcare system.
In response to suggestions, Christensen also sought to clarify how firms could defend themselves against disruption. In due course, as outlined in the book he co-authored, Competing Against Luck, (Harper Business, 2016), Christensen began telling a new story: the milkshake story and explaining the theory of "the job-to-be-done".
“This was the story of a fast-food chain that wanted to know how to sell more milkshakes and spent months asking customers how it should improve the product, to no avail. Only when the company started asking why customers bought the drink did they work out that, in the morning, commuters purchased it as the ideal accompaniment for a long and boring drive to work. In the afternoon, though, it did a different job, for parents treating their children.”
By identifying the different “jobs to be done” for which customers “hired” the milkshake — and the different products against which it competed — the chain gained a better idea of how to develop it. Through experimentation, it was able to “compete against luck” and introduce new products that were more likely to hit the target market.
Christensen At The Drucker Forum
Christensen also played a pivotal role on several occasions at the annual Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna. Those of us who heard him at the Drucker Forum in 2014 were inspired by his call to find a common language to talk about the management issues that we all care about. I transcribed part of his talk here and the full video is here.
“It was a defining moment,” says Richard Straub, Founder & President of the Drucker Forum, “when Clayton Christensen gave the final statement in a session with Adi Ignatius to close out the 6th Global Peter Drucker Forum in 2014.”
Christensen suggested inter alia that the impact of the good ideas being discussed at events such as the Drucker Forum was hampered by differences in language and terminology. With so many good ideas, it was hard to make sense of them. What if, Christensen asked, thought leaders could learn to speak in the same language with common terminology?
“My goodness, we have great ideas! But I am not sure that I can replicate what anybody said because there are so many great ideas… Let’s take the best of each other’s ideas and the best of each other’s language and the best of each other’s ways of communicating what we are thinking about. And in the process, we would be expanding the breadth of the ideas. I think we need to standardize what we have in mind. If we could focus and clarify our message, we would have a better impact.”
A New Martin Luther For Management
Earlier in 2014, Christensen also suggested an analogy between the problems facing management and the era of Martin Luther, back in the 16th Century. For instance, he wrote in Harvard Business Review in June 2014: “The orthodoxies governing finance are so entrenched that we almost need a modern-day Martin Luther to articulate the need for change.”
In fact, the Protestant Reformation didn’t coalesce instantaneously on the basis of Luther’s call for change. It proceeded in a fragmented fashion for another hundred years. Doctrinal differences that in retrospect seem minuscule in comparison to the extensive common ground prevented a united Protestant front. With the wisdom of hindsight, we can see that if these leaders had been able to set aside their tiny doctrinal differences and explicitly recognize the broad issues on which they did agree, the Reformation could have moved much faster.
So, Christensen was suggesting, that is the challenge facing the fragmented field of management today. Will the thought leaders in management continue to pursue their remarkably similar ideas in a fragmented fashion with different language and terminology? Or will they respond to his call, learn from the experience of education and software development, and come together and agree on common language and terminology? If Christensen is right, the future of management depends on it.
“[His statement] came from his heart with genuine emotion – as the video shows,” says Straub. “He has been a wonderful friend, mentor, and supporter ever since. His generosity, humility, and kindness help us to trace the way for the Forum. But above all, he has reminded us—just as Drucker did—that the most important measure for our endeavors will be the individuals whose lives we touched.”
