Clayton Christensen
May 15, 2012 10:31 AM   Subscribe

Clayton Christensen is the most influential business thinker on the planet. He's been everywhere lately: On Charlie Rose, in the New Yorker (pay-walled), in the Steve Jobs biography (as the author of the only business book to have influenced Jobs). He has applied his ideas of Disruptive Innovation and Jobs-to-be-Done (pdf) to industries such as healthcare and higher education. Recently he has been trying to apply them to personal and career development. He's also a devout Mormon (and a generous Romney campaign contributor) and a cancer, stroke, and heart attack survivor.
posted by AceRock (10 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
He is also a genuinely nice guy. His insights on the innovator's dilemma were a real breakthrough in understanding how technology works (though Jim Utterback from MIT had some similar insights at the same time. His later stuff is more quixotic, but still interesting.

The website for his new thing is How Will You Measure Your Life. I don't know much about it, but he is an impressive thinker, so it may be worth some time to read.
posted by blahblahblah at 10:37 AM on May 15, 2012


Both of the Innovator's books are good stuff. I don't do much business reading, but I found his stuff engaging and really, really useful for understanding the life cycles of companies.
posted by jquinby at 10:41 AM on May 15, 2012


...and both, I mean The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution. He's done others along the same theme, but I've only read those two.
posted by jquinby at 10:42 AM on May 15, 2012


I read the Harvard How Will You Measure Your Life link. Not bad. Some of the comments there also are worthwhile.
posted by bukvich at 10:54 AM on May 15, 2012


"Mind you, while this is more than Tom Friedman gets" : Nope.
posted by stratastar at 10:55 AM on May 15, 2012


The devout Mormon link is worth a read, both for the paragraph about helping an elderly Hispanic couple in their new apartment, and the stuff about healing the sick and speaking in tongues at the end.
posted by roger ackroyd at 10:55 AM on May 15, 2012


One of the guys I've worked with studied under Christensen at Harvard Business School. Said he argued with Christensen that the innovator's dilemma didn't apply to Microsoft, where he was working at the time.

Said buddy said it he subsequently admitted it was the dumbest argument he's ever tried to make.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:00 AM on May 15, 2012


1) The Disruptive Innovation link bolluxed my browser.
2) Aren't the Healthcare and Higher Education industries rather broken nowadays? Something about costs rising at much higher rates than other parts of the economy?
posted by Billiken at 11:21 AM on May 15, 2012


Clayton Christensen was interviewed recently on Horace Dediu's The Critical Path. The beginning is good but he seemed to lose it a bit towards the end. He had trouble grasping that Apple was disrupting itself with the iPad (Macs) and the iPhone (iPods).
posted by euphorb at 11:46 AM on May 15, 2012


Clayton Christensen is the most influential business thinker on the planet.

A bit like being the world's tallest midget?
posted by MartinWisse at 3:01 AM on May 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


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