Clayton Christensen has died
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Clayton Christensen has died
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Re: Clayton Christensen has died
#2I think Clayton Christensen is one of those rare professors from Management B-School whose principles and theories made so much sense and helped a lot in many businesses and in fact in life.
Things like Jobs to be done and How do you measure your life are wonderful things for anyone to pursue in life (in a general sense)
Re: Clayton Christensen has died
#3When I was in college I read “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. It totally changed my life. I emailed Dr. Christensen and he responded! I thought i was the king of the world.
Dr. Clayton Christensen’s books are some of the few ‘Business’ books that I ever recommend to friends or colleagues. I find that “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is applicable to almost all aspects of life.
Dr. Christensen will be greatly missed.
Re: Clayton Christensen has died
#4Innovator's Dilemma and Competing Against Luck are the two best business books that any tech person should read.
I have my students and product design team read them.
Re: Clayton Christensen has died
#5Outside of his influence on the business world, I've met him a couple times and he was such a kind and genuine man. There are a lot of business school professors who reach far less heights, often in obscure areas, and they let it go straight to their heads.
Re: Clayton Christensen has died
#6Mormon here and I had no idea how influential he was to some of the greats in business.
Re: Clayton Christensen has died
#7I remember reading How Will You Measure Your Life years ago right after college and enjoying it.
I also found the following section from the article especially thought-provoking:
> He second-guessed the wording of the label, but never the theory. Even after he changed his terminology to disruptive innovation, he saw flaws.
> “What we didn’t anticipate, and what in many ways was a fault of mine,” he told Quartz.com in 2016, “was that the term disruption has so many different connotations in the English language, that it allows people to justify whatever they want to do as, ‘Oh, this is disruptive,’ and they don’t ever read the book. The population of people where the fewest have read the book are venture capitalists. They are arrogant and smart and why do they need to read something?”
> He wished he’d created something less expressive. He began to discuss type 1 innovations and type 2 innovations, with a nod to Daniel Kahneman, because he believed those terms were vague enough to force people to read and understand his work more closely.
It makes me think about the way complex ideas get distorted and re-interpreted as they get repeated, like in a game of Telephone.
Re: Clayton Christensen has died
#8His book How Will You Measure Your Life? is a really great read (all his books are great).
Here is a good summery of his theory of disruptive innovation: https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/4-keys-to-understanding-cla...
Re: Clayton Christensen has died
#9When I was in college I read “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. It totally changed my life. I emailed Dr. Christensen and he responded! I thought i was the king of the world. Dr. Clayton Christensen’s books are some of the few ‘Business’ books that I ever recommend to friends or colleagues. I find that “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is applicable to almost all aspects of life. Dr. Christensen will be greatly missed.
// I find that “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is applicable to almost all aspects of life.
How is it relevant to life, or business(besides being in a startup or protecting a business from it)?
Re: Clayton Christensen has died
#10This is incredibly tragic—Clayton had the courage to leverage data in a very confined setting. A recipe that rarely works in academia (I’m a b-school prof/associate dean). And, all the ingredients to his disruption thesis were already there in his study of the hard-drive industry. His capacity to take that ball and carry it from academia across to the managerial end-zone is a mere pipe-dream for most. For Clayton, it was second nature.
His impact across both scholars and managers alike is—to this day—a singularity.