01The word everyone uses
Ask a room of MBAs to name one management idea from the past thirty years and most will say disruption. Fewer can state it correctly, which annoyed the man who coined it for the rest of his life. The theory arrived in a Harvard Business Review article with Joseph Bower in early 1995 and then in The Innovator's Dilemma in 1997, a book about disk-drive makers and steel minimills that won the Global Business Book Award and led The Economist to call its author "the most influential management thinker of his time". The argument was narrow and testable: good companies listen to their best customers, invest in what those customers want, and are undercut from below by simpler, cheaper products that improve until they are good enough. Wikipedia notes that he kept writing articles into the 2010s to correct people who used the word to mean any new thing that sold.
The record on the books is long: a dozen titles on Wikipedia's list, from The Innovator's Solution (2003) through Disrupting Class (2008) on schools, The Innovator's Prescription (2008) on health care, and The Prosperity Paradox (2019), his last, on why innovation lifts poor countries. Thinkers50 ranked him first in the world in 2011 and again in 2013, and third in 2017.
02Rose Park to Oxford
He was the second of eight children, raised in the Rose Park neighbourhood on the west side of Salt Lake City, student body president at West High and, at 6 feet 8 inches, a useful centre. In 1970 he held offers from Harvard, Yale and Brigham Young University and, in his own telling, made the choice a matter of prayer and felt a clear impression to take BYU's full scholarship. His first-year economics class included Mitt Romney and Kim B. Clark, later the dean of Harvard Business School whose name is on the chair Christensen held. He broke off for a two-year mission to South Korea from 1971 to 1973, came back speaking Korean, and graduated summa cum laude in economics in 1975. A Rhodes Scholarship took him to Queen's College, Oxford for a master's in applied econometrics, finished in 1977, and to the starting centre's spot on a university basketball team that won the British university championship in 1975 and 1976 and a national non-league title in 1977. One of those championship games fell on a Sunday, and he did not play; the team won anyway, and his later comment, reported by the Deseret News, was that this "must mean I wasn't as important to the team as I thought I was". Then Harvard: an MBA with high distinction in 1979, a job at Boston Consulting Group, a year in Washington as a White House Fellow in 1982 working for Transportation Secretaries Drew Lewis and Elizabeth Dole, and in 1984 a company. Ceramics Process Systems, founded with several MIT professors, made advanced ceramics; he ran it as president and chief executive through the late 1980s before leaving to do a doctorate. The DBA came in 1992, and Harvard Business School hired him the same year. He reached full professor in six years, a school record, got tenure in 1998 and the Kim B. Clark chair in 2001.
03Positions by year
| Year | Position or company |
|---|---|
| 1979 | Consultant and project manager, Boston Consulting Group |
| 1982 | White House Fellow, assistant to the Secretary of Transportation |
| 1984 | Co-founder, later president and CEO, Ceramics Process Systems (now CPS Technologies) |
| 1992 | Joins Harvard Business School faculty |
| 2000 | Co-founds Innosight, consulting firm, with Mark W. Johnson |
| 2005 | Innosight Ventures, investing in South, Southeast and East Asia |
| 2007 | Co-founds Rose Park Advisors, investment firm named for his childhood neighbourhood |
| 2002-2009 | Area Seventy, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints |
Rose Park Advisors applied the theory to picking companies, and its best-known pick paid off after he died. The firm was an early investor in Coupang, the South Korean e-commerce company, and held about 5.1 percent when Coupang listed on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2021, selling 130 million shares at $35 and raising about $4.55 billion. He also sat on the boards of Tata Consultancy Services, Franklin Covey and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and for a time on the editorial board of the Deseret News.
04How will you measure your life
The talk he gave to Harvard Business School's graduating class in 2010 became a Harvard Business Review essay that won the McKinsey Award and, in 2012, a book with James Allworth and Karen Dillon. The premise was that the same tools that explain why companies fail can explain why careers and marriages do. He had by then been diagnosed with follicular lymphoma, in February 2010, and in July of that year a stroke took much of his speech; he rebuilt it in therapy and went on teaching. In the Church he served as a bishop, as a counsellor in the presidency of the Massachusetts Boston Mission and, from 2002 to 2009, as an Area Seventy, and in 2013 he wrote The Power of Everyday Missionaries about how members could share their faith without a formal calling. Outside it he spent 25 years in Scouting roles and eight on the Belmont, Massachusetts town council.
Which must mean I wasn't as important to the team as I thought I was.
He died of complications of leukaemia in Boston on January 23, 2020, at 67. His wife Christine, whom he married in 1976, and five children survived him; the eldest, Matthew, played on Duke's 2001 national championship basketball team.
05The 2017 prediction
- Forbes cover story, 2011: one of the most influential business theorists of the last 50 years
- Herbert Simon Award, 2014; Edison Achievement Award, 2015; BYU Distinguished Service Award, 2015
- Eight honorary doctorates and an honorary chair at National Tsinghua University, Taiwan
In 2017 he said that "50 percent of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years". The window runs to somewhere between 2027 and 2032. You can check the count yourself.