Clayton Magleby Christensen (1952–2020) was an American organizational theorist and Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He was best known for his analysis of innovation in commercial enterprises. He was one of the most influential management thinkers of his time.
Born in a Mormon family in Salt Lake City, Utah, Christensen attended Brigham Young University. He took two years off to be a Mormon missionary in South Korea before returning to graduate in 1975. As a Rhodes Scholar, he studied econometrics at Queen’s College-Oxford, receiving an M.Phil. in 1977.
Christensen also got an MBA from Harvard in 1979 and worked as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group. He founded Ceramics Process Systems Corporation with a group of academics and ran it as chief executive for much of the 1980s. Transferring to academia, he joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1992.
Christensen is best known for his book The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997,) which propagated the idea of disruptive innovation—the notion that a smaller company with fewer resources can depose an established, successful business by targeting fragments of the market that have been neglected by the incumbent who’d be focusing on more profitable areas. Christensen followed up The Innovator’s Dilemma with such popular books as The Innovator’s Solution (2003,) Innovation and the General Manager (2003,) and The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations out of Poverty (2019.)
Toward the end of his life, after suffering a stroke and contracting cancer, Christensen published a Harvard Business Review article describing how he incorporated his musings on religion into his academic work. He expanded this article as How Will You Measure Your Life (2012,) recasting his management theories as a prescription for gauging how best to live one’s life.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Clayton M. Christensen
If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.
—Clayton M. Christensen
The best that companies can do is let a thousand flowers bloom, in the hope that one of them sprouts into a substantial growth business.
—Clayton M. Christensen
In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.
—Clayton M. Christensen
Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you’re good at.
—Clayton M. Christensen
To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well.
—Clayton M. Christensen
It’s easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.
—Clayton M. Christensen
In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.
—Clayton M. Christensen
You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it’s effectively implemented.
—Clayton M. Christensen
Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.
—Clayton M. Christensen
Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain
—Clayton M. Christensen
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Orson Scott Card American Author
Stephen Covey American Self-help Author
Sheryl Sandberg American Executive, Author
Douglas Adams British Author
Marvin Bower American Business Consultant
Michael Porter American Management Theorist
Marion G. Romney American Mormon Religious Leader
Seth Godin American Entrepreneur
Tim Ferriss American Self-help Author
Glenn L. Pace American Church Leader