Harvard Professor Clayton M. Christensen Turned His Life Into a Case Study

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Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and management guru, was an authority on what he called disruptive technologies who became more widely known for offering his life as a case study. Dr. Christensen, whose books included “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” died Thursday in Boston. He was 67 and had leukemia. In the 1990s, he warned entrepreneurs against being so focused on pleasing their current customers that they missed shifts in technology that could render their firms obsolete. “To remain at the top of their industries, managers must first be able to spot disruptive technologies,” he wrote. Doing that, he said, required creating organizations independent of the mainstream business. Read a 1983 article by Clayton Christensen. Read a 1983 article by Clayton Christensen. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL In a 2010 article and lecture, “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” later expanded into a book, he advised business-school students to devote part of their time to creating a strategy for living a good life. Having a clear purpose mattered more than mastering core competence and disruptive innovations, he said. A lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he recounted a tough decision he made while playing basketball for a team at Oxford University. He outraged teammates by refusing to participate in a championship game on a Sunday. “Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed,” he wrote. As a consultant and professor, Dr. Christensen saw his role as telling people how to think rather than what to do. He urged students to look beyond profit margins and near-term results. “More and more M.B.A. students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies,” he wrote. “That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.” Dr. Christensen put his faith at the center of his messages but said his prescriptions for leading a successful life applied to everyone. OTHER OBITUARIES Bryant Was a Precocious Pioneer, Five-Time Champion January 26, 2020 Jim Lehrer of PBS’s ‘NewsHour’ Dies at 85 January 23, 2020 CVS Co-Founder’s Career Was Disrupted by Social Activism January 23, 2020 Clayton Magleby Christensen, the second of eight children, was born April 6, 1952, in Salt Lake City. His father managed a grocery department in a department store. His mother was a high school English teacher and wrote for radio programs. In sixth grade, he read the entire World Book encyclopedia, according to his family. Around the same age, he became a regular reader of the Congressional Record and made charts of the voting records of members of Congress. One early ambition was to become editor of The Wall Street Journal. Standing 6-foot-8, he played basketball in high school and college. Following the tradition of his church, he worked as a missionary in South Korea in the early 1970s. While studying economics at Brigham Young University, he met Christine Quinn, who was studying English there. They married in 1976. After graduating from Brigham Young, he studied econometrics at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In 1979, he received an M.B.A. degree at Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar. He then went to work for Boston Consulting Group as a management consultant. He took a sabbatical in 1982 to be a White House Fellow and served as an assistant to U.S. Transportation Secretaries Drew Lewis and Elizabeth Dole. In the mid-1980s, he helped found Ceramics Process Systems Corp., a Cambridge, Mass.-based maker of materials used in microelectronics and other industries. He joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1992. One of his goals was to explain why business success was hard to sustain over long periods. In his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” he wrote that companies could lose their way by doing two things managers were taught to do in business school: listening to their best customers and focusing investments on innovations promising the highest returns. Those practices could be disastrous if they prevented executives from spotting the potential for disruptive technologies arising from the low end of the market. Digital Equipment Corp., he wrote, was so focused in the 1980s on its high-end minicomputers that it was blindsided by the arrival of desktop computers able to satisfy many corporate needs more cheaply. While teaching and writing books, he also found time to set up an investment firm, Rose Park Advisors, a management-consulting firm called Innosight and a think tank studying public policy. In his spare time, he was a self-taught maker of furniture. Vacations with his children routinely included tours of mines and factories. Branding could apply to families as well as goods and services, he believed. When one of his children was accused of pushing another student at school, Dr. Christensen convened a family meeting. “The brand is that the Christensens are known for kindness,” he said. He expected that brand to serve him well in the afterlife. “When I pass on and have my interview with God, he is not going to say, ‘Oh my gosh, Clay Christensen, you were a famous professor at H.B.S.,’” Dr. Christensen told the Journal in a 2016 interview. “He’s going to say…‘Can we just talk about the individual people you helped become better people?…Can we talk about what you did to help [your children] become wonderful people?’”