EXEC BECAME TOP BUSINESS THINKER.
Clayton Christensen, a Harvard University business school professor who became one of the world’s most influential business thinkers, died from complications from leukemia Jan. 23 in Boston. He was 67.
A former all-state basketball player, Christensen was perhaps an unlikely Ivy League academic. Raised in poverty in Salt Lake City, he was known for his thriftiness, and drove the same Chevy Nova for years.
He had worked at Boston Consulting and co-founded an advanced materials company before joining the Harvard faculty, deciding he was better suited as an analyst than an executive.
He spent most of his career answering one common question: How is it that a small startup can take on an industry giant — one with a robust research lab and seemingly top-notch management — and win? Paradoxically, Christensen found that many companies succeeded not by making something better, but by making something worse, in cheap products for the low end of the market.
For example, in the 1950s, Sony released cheap transistor radios, which primarily appealed to teens before overtaking fancier radios by RCA and Zenith. Christensen found that the same model played out with everything from excavators to Model Ts, and called it “disruptive innovation.”
He distilled his findings into The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), which the Economist named one of the six greatest business books ever written. His followup was The Innovator’s Solution (2003). “Disruption” became an inescapable buzzword.
He reportedly earned $100,000 per talk on the lecture circuit and continually refined his theories, even after a stroke in 2010 forced him to spend more than a year working to recover.
The second of eight children, Clayton Magleby Christensen was born April 6, 1952.
He went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, earning a master’s in applied econometrics in 1977. In 1979, he graduated from Harvard Business School, returned for a doctorate in business administration in 1992 and was named full professor six years later.
In 1976, he married Christine Quinn. She and their five children, nine grandchildren and five siblings survive him.