Elogy on Clayton Christensen by Sarah Cliffe

From Sarah Cliffe, Executive Editor, Harvard Business Review |  January 31, 2020

? As various tributes have attested, the late Clayton Christensen’s work profoundly influenced generations of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Harvard Business Review had the good fortune to publish a couple dozen of his brilliant, ground-breaking articles.

Clay had an interesting relationship — I‘d almost call it a partnership — with the magazine. We provided him with a platform for reaching far more people than he could in the classroom, and I know that he valued the editorial support that he got.

But he also cared about HBR’s larger mission and he held us to a high standard. He would use HBR articles when teaching students the importance of theory to critical thinking. As I understand it, they would discuss whether a piece’s authors had a coherent theory, how fully developed it was, and whether they had backed up their claims. He visited our offices on occasion to share the classes’ conclusions about how we measured up (sometimes well, sometimes... not so much).

To understand Clay, most people start with his analysis of how start-ups can disrupt incumbents — it came in the nick of time, as waves of technological innovation were creating the conditions for massive changes that would redraw industry boundaries and put long-lived, hugely profitable companies out of business. He introduced that theory in “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,” a 1995 article written with his HBS colleague Joseph Bower.

Most of Clay’s pieces over the next 25 years continued to explore aspects of disruptive innovation. To name just a few: “Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change” looked at how incumbent companies could survive disruption. “Skate to Where the Money Will Be” gave managers tools to figure out where their industries were headed. And “What Is Disruptive Innovation?” circled back to the original theory, taking into account the technological changes that had occurred in the intervening years.

Nearly all of Clay’s work dealt with the intersection of strategy and innovation — but he was never one to stay in a narrow lane. In “Reinventing Your Business Model” he took a buzz-filled, trendy notion and gave it heft. In other articles, he explored how financial metrics sabotage true innovation and applied disruption theory to health care, consulting, and capitalism itself. More recently he gave a lot of thought to jump-starting innovation in emerging markets.

Clay revisited ideas time and time again, always deepening them. I believe that his notion of “jobs to be done” first showed up in the 2005 article “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure” (which included his famous story about researching the “job” that a thick milkshake does for someone driving to work). But he brought new depth to the concept in 2016’s “Know Your Customers’ ‘Jobs to Be Done’” — and I’m sure he’d have refined it further had we been given the gift of a few more years.

In 2010 my colleague Karen Dillon had the brilliant idea of turning a talk Clay had given to the HBS graduating class into an article. “How Will You Measure Your Life?” had a powerful impact on readers. It changed Karen’s life, as she recently reported, and it also changed HBR. It made us realize that our readers were as interested in their purpose and moral development as they were in the technical knowledge we usually focused on and that those topics belonged firmly in our pages.

I was lucky enough to work on many of Clay’s articles. It was always an adventure. A manuscript would arrive, usually after some preliminary discussion, and I would dig into the editing, conferring with his coauthors as I went. We’d copy Clay on our correspondence, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t follow along. Eventually he would summon me to his office, generally about a week before deadline, and we’d go through the latest version, paragraph by paragraph.

It was a joy to witness his mind at work — those meetings were among the high points of my professional life — but I would walk away thinking, I can’t possibly get this into shape on time; he’s made it into something entirely new. Later, in going over my notes, I would realize it was exactly the same article we’d always been working on — but a far better-realized version of it. Once our changes had been worked through, my colleague Andrea Ovans would often take the baton — in theory, to line edit and copyedit, but also to continue developing the ideas.

Once Clay really engaged with something, he did not let go. Andrea and Clay would spend hours on the phone pinning down logic and finding accessible ways to convey complex concepts. It was always a relief when the issue closed and no more changes could be made — and a source of great pride when the piece appeared in print.

Clay’s research and theories were powerful, and they’ll live on. But his greatest legacy may be the hundreds of people he inspired over a lifetime of generosity and service. Those of us here who collaborated on his articles count ourselves fortunate to be among that group.

Thanks for reading,

Sarah