Clayton Christensen, Guru of ‘Disruptive Innovation,’ Dies at 67

In 1976 he married Christine Quinn, whom he had met as a freshman at Brigham Young. She survives him, as do their children, Matthew, Michael, Spencer, Ann and Catherine Christensen; and nine grandchildren.

After graduating with an M.B.A. from Harvard in 1979, Professor Christensen joined Boston Consulting Group. He and a group of M.I.T. professors later founded Ceramics Process Systems Corporation, which he ran as chief executive for much of the 1980s.

He made the career switch into academia in 1992 when he joined the Harvard Business School faculty, and for many years he taught a course called “Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise.” He focused his theories on a wide range of industries, from education to health care.

“One of the things that gave my dad’s research such power was its credibility and practicality — having been a leader and executive himself, he knew what would be meaningful and relevant in the real world,” his oldest son, Matthew, said in a statement. “He knew that because of culture and inertia, sometimes the right thing to do was counterintuitive, perhaps even hard.”

When he first learned he had cancer, he decided to write about how he reconsidered his impact on the business world. In 2012 he published “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” a book, written with two co-authors, that was based on an article of the same name that had appeared in Harvard Business Review. In it, he recast his management theories as a formula for measuring how best to live one’s life.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/business/clayton-christensen-dead.html?emc=rss&partner=rss