Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today, I want
to start with a bit of a visual. OK, let's hear
it. I want you to picture a man walking into
a room. And the very first thing you notice about
him, well, before he even opens his mouth or
before you know anything about his brain, is
that he has to literally duck to get through
the doorway. Right, because he was just a massive
guy, a literal giant. Exactly. Six feet, eight
inches tall. That's 2 .03 meters for anyone using
the metric system. Just a towering figure. Yeah.
And usually, you know, when you see someone that
size, your brain automatically goes to the NBA.
Yeah. You don't usually think Harvard Business
School professor. No, you think center forward,
right? Not academic theorist. But today, we are
diving into a man who is a giant in, honestly,
both of those senses. We are unpacking the life
and the mind of Clayton Christensen. Such an
important figure. Really is. I mean, if you spent
even five minutes in the business world or working
in tech or even just reading the news over the
last 20 years, you definitely know his vocabulary.
You know the words he gave us. For sure. You
hear disruption or disruptive innovation all
the time. The buzzwords. To end all buzzwords,
I feel like disruption is thrown around so much
now that it can be anything from like my Uber
is running late to just a new flavor of potato
chip. And that drove him absolutely crazy. It
really did. Because Clayton Christensen was a
very precise thinker. He wasn't some tech hype
man. He was a rigorous academic and a deeply
religious man and a former CEO who was trying
to solve a very specific puzzle. And when people
use disruption to just mean change or chaos or
just something cool and new, it totally diluted
the actual warning he was trying to give people.
So that is our mission today. We are going to
reclaim that word. I love that. Yeah, we're going
to look at our source stack, which today includes
his biography, his major publication history,
and basically the collected records and summaries
of his life and career. A lot of really rich
material there. So much. And we're using all
of that to move beyond the business jargon and
understand what the innovator's dilemma actually
is. Because it's not just a standard business
theory. No, it's really a theory about why successful
people and incredibly successful companies fail.
And the crazy part is they fail precisely because
they are doing everything exactly right. Right.
That is the whole crux of it is the tragedy of
good management. Exactly. But we're also going
to look at the man himself because his actual
life story is honestly is not at all what I expected
when we started researching this. It really takes
some wild terms. Right. We've got back -to -back
basketball championships at Oxford. We've got
a stint in the White House, a missionary gap
year in Korea, and this really heartbreaking
battle with his own mortality that eventually
turned his whole... analytical lens onto the
human soul. Right. His book, How Will You Measure
Your Life? Exactly. So let's just jump right
into it. Let's go all the way back to the beginning.
Before he was the disruption guy, he was just
a very tall kid growing up in Utah. In Rose Park
specific. Which is a neighborhood in Salt Lake
City, right? Yeah. He was born there on April
6th, 1952. Clayton Meggleby Christensen. And
Rose Park wasn't just a random dot on the map
for him. It seems like it really shaped him.
Oh, it definitely stuck with him. It was a very
working class, very humble neighborhood. And
he was the second of eight children. Eight kids,
man. Yeah. That has to be a loud house. A very
loud, incredibly busy house. His parents, Robert
and Verda May, they ran a tight ship, but a very
loving one. And you're totally right about Rose
Park sticking with him. Yeah, because it's later
on. Decades later, when he's this world famous
guru and he starts his own venture capital and
investment firm, he doesn't name it Christensen
Capital or Disruption Ventures. He names it Rose
Park Advisors. Exactly. He really wanted to remember
exactly where he came from. I love that so much.
It just grounds. So, okay, he's growing up in
Salt Lake. He's hitting that six foot eight mark
and naturally picks up a basketball. Right. He
was a very serious athlete. He went to West High
School where he was actually the student body
president, but on the court he was just a total
force. A leader everywhere. Yeah, and this sets
up a pattern we are going to see again and again
with him. He wasn't just the jock and he wasn't
just the nerd. He was always both. Right. He
always insisted on inhabiting these different
worlds simultaneously. Which perfectly brings
us to 1970, high school graduation. and really
the first massive decision of his life, the whole
college application process. And this is where
we really get the first clear glimpse of his
character, because he applies to the big guns,
Harvard, Yale, and Brigham Young University,
DYU. OK, let's stop there for a second. Because
if you are this ambitious, brilliant kid in 1970,
and you get a fat acceptance envelope from Harvard
and from Yale, you just go, that is the golden
ticket. That's the established path to the Senate
or Wall Street or the Supreme Court. Conventionally,
yeah, it's a total no -brainer. But you have
to understand, Christensen was a very devout
member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
-day Saints. His faith wasn't just a background
thing for him. Not at all. It was the operating
system of his entire life. So how does a guy
like that decide? I mean, does he make a pros
and cons spreadsheet? He might have made it.
made a spreadsheet knowing him. But the final
decision was to use his own words, a matter of
prayer. Wow. He prayed about it, and he felt
this distinct, clear impression. that he needed
to go to BYU. Even though Harvard's Harvard.
To be fair, BYU did offer him a full scholarship,
the Kimball Scholarship, which certainly didn't
hurt. But he turned down the Ivy League because
he genuinely felt a spiritual mandate to be in
Provo, Utah. And looking back at the sources,
it's not like he suffered intellectually for
it. I was looking at who was sitting in his freshman
economics class, and it's actually. It's kind
of insane. Oh, it's a literal who's who of modern
American leadership. You have Clayton Christensen
in one seat. In another seat, you have Mitt Romney,
who obviously would go on to run for president
of the United States. Right. And in yet another
seat, you have Kim B. Clark. Who later became
the actual dean of Harvard Business School. Exactly.
So you have these three future titans sitting
in the exact same freshman econ one class in
Provo. Wild. It's a pretty good argument that
it's the student and not just the prestige of
the school that really matters. So true. So he's
a BYU. He's studying economics. He's playing
basketball. But then he just kind of disappears.
He does. He takes a gap. But it's not your typical
gap year to go backpack through Europe and find
himself. Right. From 1971 to 1973, he takes a
leave to serve a full time mission for the LDS
church in South Korea. Now we need a quick context
check here. Because South Korea in 1971 is not
the South Korea of K -pop and Samsung and high
-speed internet. No today. Oh, not at all. It
was still very much a developing nation at that
point. It was still recovering from the war.
It was gritty. Yeah. And he wasn't staying in
some nice expat hotel. He was living the very
raw life of a missionary, knocking on doors,
speaking the local language, eating the local
food. And he actually became completely fluent
in Korean, right? Right, completely fluent. And
honestly, I think this specific experience is
crucial for understanding his later theories.
How so? Well, when you live in a developing economy,
you see what he would later call low -end disruption
in real time. Ah, I see. You see how people make
do with much cheaper, simpler solutions because
they simply can't afford the high -end stuff?
He didn't have the academic vocabulary for it
yet, but he was soaking in all that data. That
makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So he comes back,
he finishes up at BYU in 1975, graduating summa
cum laude. Naturally. Naturally. And then the
global prestige finally catches up with him.
He wins the Rhodes Scholarship. Off to Oxford,
he goes to Queens College. And this is where
the story gets... Super cinematic for me because
he goes all the way to Oxford to study applied
econometrics, which is let's just be brutally
honest here Incredibly dry. Yeah, it's the heavy
complex mathematics of economics, right? So you
naturally picture him in this dusty old British
library surrounded by leather bound books just
crunching numbers all day But that's only half
the day. What is he doing the rest of the time?
He is dominating the paint. He joins the Oxford
men's basketball team. I just love the visual
of this giant American kid crashing into these
polite British academics on the court. It really
is a funny image, but they were incredibly serious
about it. With Christensen playing as their starting
center, Oxford actually won the British University
Sports Federation championship. back to back.
1975 and 76. So he's a British national champion.
Technically, yes. And in 1977, they even won
the English Basketball Association's national
title for non league teams. That is amazing.
So he's literally writing a thesis on econometrics
in the morning and then winning national sports
trophies in the evening. Talk about rain. It
really reinforces that idea that he had this
massive capacity. He never felt like he had to
trade one talent for another. But eventually,
you know, you have to get a You can't just play
center for Oxford forever. True. So he comes
back to the States and he goes to Harvard Business
School for his MBA. Finally made it to Harvard.
He did. He graduates with high distinction in
1979 and immediately joins the Boston Consulting
Group, BCG. Basically the ultimate boot camp
for business strategy. Exactly. And then he does
a really interesting stint as a White House fellow
in 1982, working as an assistant to the U .S.
Secretary of Transportation in D .C. Getting
that government perspective. Right. So he's seeing
how the federal government works at the highest
level. He's seeing the bureaucracy and the logistics.
But here is the pivot point that I think is the
most important part of his early career, because
up until now, he's been a consultant, a student,
a government aide. He's been an advisor. Exactly.
But in 1984, He decides he wants to be the decider.
He wants to actually run something. Right. He
becomes an entrepreneur. He co -founds a company
called Ceramics Process Systems Corporation,
which is actually now known as CPS Technologies.
And this wasn't just some simple software startup
or a lemonade stand. This was serious, hardcore
material science. MIT professors were deeply
involved. Yes, advanced ceramics, very high tech
manufacturing stuff. And Christensen served as
the president and the CEO. And this is the part
of his life that gets glossed over in the biography
sometimes, but it is so vital to understand him.
It was really hard. What made it so hard? Well,
he struggled. He had this brilliant technology,
right? These advanced ceramics that could do
amazing things, but he had a lot of trouble actually
selling them. He faced this classic problem where
the technology was great, but the market just
wasn't ready, or the specific application wasn't
quite right. So he's the CEO, he's obviously
brilliant, he has smart investors, he has the
absolute best tech heart, and he's still just
banging his head against the wall. Exactly. And
that intense frustration is the actual seed of
the innovators dilemma. The real world data.
Yeah. He realized that all the standard business
advice he learned at HBS, you know, listen to
your best customers, build... better products,
it just wasn't working for his startup. In fact,
following that very advice was almost killing
his company. So he was literally living the dilemma
before he ever named it. He really was. So he
eventually left the CEO role and decided to go
back to Harvard to get his doctorate. He needed
answers. Right. He needed to figure out why.
Why do you smart people with good tech fail?
He wasn't just sitting around theorizing. He
was actively investigating his own professional
scars. That is fascinating. So he enters the
DBA. program at Harvard, gets his doctorate in
1992, and joins the faculty. And then from what
the sources show, his career just completely
explodes. It was a rocket ship. He achieved the
rank of full professor in only six years. That's
fast. That is a record at HBS. Getting tenure
usually takes much, much longer. And it was all
because of the groundbreaking research that eventually
culminated in his 1997 book, The Innovator's
Dilemma. OK, so we are here. The main event.
The theory itself, we really need to unpack this
properly for you listening, because like we said
earlier, people think disruption just means,
oh, Uber came along and it was way cooler than
taxis. Which is just factually wrong. Or at the
very least, it's wildly incomplete. So teach
me. Walk me through it. Let's say I'm a CEO.
I'm running a very successful company. Let's
say I make heavy duty excavators. big earth moving
machines. That is a great example. This is actually
one of the exact industries he studied in depth.
Oh, perfect. So you're the CEO of a company making
massive traditional steam shovels. Your best
customers are giant mining companies. They want
huge buckets. They want maximum power. They want
to literally move mountains. Okay, and I give
it to them. I have my engineers make the buckets
bigger. I make the engines way stronger. I listen
to exactly what they ask for. And you are a fantastic
manager for doing exactly that. You are practicing
what Christensen called sustaining innovation.
You are making your already good product better
for your most demanding, best paying customers.
You can charge higher prices. Your profit margins
go up. Wall Street absolutely loves you. Life
is good then. My stock is up. So where's the
threat? The threat is a little scrappy startup
in a garage somewhere. They invent a totally
new technology, let's say in this case, hydraulics.
But here's the catch. The early hydraulics are
weak. I can't lift a mountain. They can only
lift a tiny scoop of dirt. And they break down
easily. So I look at that little hydraulic shovel
as a CEO, and I say, well, that's a toy. My giant
mining customers can't use that thing. And you
are 100 % right. Your customers do not want it.
If you tried to sell that weak hydraulic shovel
to them, they would laugh you out of the boardroom.
So completely rationally, you ignore it. You
stick to your highly profitable steam shovels.
That makes perfect sense. Why on earth would
I divert resources to invest in a worse product?
Because that little hydraulic shovel finds a
totally different customer base. Maybe it's a
small residential contractor, just a guy digging
a ditch in a backyard. OK. He can't afford your
giant steam shovel, nor does he need one. But
he loves the little hydraulic one. It's cheap.
It's small. It gets his specific job done. OK,
so the startup gets the backyard ditch market.
I really don't care about that. That's absolute
peanuts. I have the multi -million dollar gold
mines. And this right here is the trap. Christensen
called this asymmetric motivation. Asymmetric
motivation. Yes. You as the incumbent are motivated
to go up market to the big money. The startup,
however, is highly motivated to capture the low
end because they have nothing else. Right. But,
and this is the absolute key mechanism of the
whole theory, technology improves faster than
customer needs do. Wait, say that again. Because
that feels like the big aha moment. Technology
improves faster than we actually need it to.
The hydraulic engineers keep tinkering. better
and better. Suddenly they can dig a basement.
Then they can dig a foundation. Then they can
dig a small quarry. Wow. And eventually, inevitably,
the hydraulic shovel becomes strong enough and
reliable enough to handle the gold mine. And
by the time I noticed this happening, it is way
too late. The hydraulic tech is now cheaper.
It's simpler and it's completely reliable. Your
big mining customers just switch over and you
are left standing there with a warehouse full
of incredibly expensive, completely obsolete
steam shovels. That is wild. And the kicker is
you didn't fail because you were stupid or lazy.
You failed because you were completely rational.
You ignored the low end because it made zero
business sense at the time until it literally
ate your entire business. That is genuinely terrifying
if you're a market leader. It basically says
that the exact thing that makes you successful
today is the very thing that structurally guarantees
your failure tomorrow. That is the dilemma. It's
structural. It's all about the resource allocation
process inside a company. How does that work?
In a big, successful company, it is very hard
to justify spending real money on a tiny, low
-margin product that your current best customers
actively hate. The financial spreadsheet will
always say no. And Christensen saw this exact
pattern everywhere, right? Hard drives. Steel
mills. Steel is a classic one he wrote about,
the mini mills. They started by melting cheap
scrap metal to make a rebar, you know, the cheap
steel rods they put in concrete. Yeah. The big
integrated steel mills looked at that and said
rebar is a terrible loam engine business. Let
them have it. We are going to retreat to high
quality, high margin sheet steel for the auto
industry. So they just gave away the bottom of
the market willingly. They fled upmarket. But
the mini mills got better. They started making
angle iron. Then they moved up to structural
beams. And finally, they figured out how to make
high quality sheet steel. And the big mills?
The big mills had nowhere left to go. They had
retreated right off a cliff. It's just incredible.
This theory completely turned the business world
upside down. The economist even called him the
most influential management thinker of his time.
And rightfully so. It explained why these massive
giants like Digital Equipment Corporation or
Sears or Kodak were suddenly struggling. It wasn't
incompetence at all. It was the innovator's dilemma.
But Christensen didn't just sit in his ivory
tower and write papers about this. He actually
started companies based on the theory. He did.
He founded Inosite in the year 2000, which is
a consulting firm designed to help companies
see these disruptions coming before they hit.
Right. And then he founded Rose Park Advisors
in 2007, which was an investment firm that specifically
used his research to invest in the disruptors.
So he was literally betting his own money on
his own brain. And winning. But what I find really
fascinating about him is that he didn't just
stop at widgets and steel and disk drives. No,
he went much bigger. He looked at the world and
said, this lens, this theory of disruption, it
totally applies to massive social systems too.
Let's talk about that. Because he made some pretty
bold claims about education and health care in
the sources we reviewed. Definitely. He wrote
a book called Disrupting Class in 2008. He looked
at the whole public education system. And he
argued that traditional schools are these monolithic
incumbent systems. They are basically forced
to teach to the middle. Which leaves a lot of
kids behind. Exactly. And he saw online learning
and computer -based learning not just as a cool
new tool, but as a classic disruptive innovation.
Because it's low cost, customizable, and super
accessible. Exactly. He predicted a massive shift
toward student -centric computer -based learning.
He even practiced what he preached right in his
own backyard. He served on the Belmont town council
where he lived, and he actively pushed for Belmont
High School to adopt online courses so they could
save money and offer a much wider variety of
classes. Oh, wow. But he also made a prediction
about universities that, well, let's just say
it made a lot of the university deans extremely
nervous. The famous 2017 prediction. Yeah. He
stated publicly that 50 % of the roughly 4 ,000
colleges and universities in the US would be
bankrupt. in 10 to 15 years. 50%. I mean, that
is an absolute apocalypse for higher education.
It is a staggering number. But he looked at the
traditional business model of the university,
you know, high fixed costs, 10 -year fancy buildings,
massive administrative bloat, and he compared
it to the skyrocketing cost of tuition. It's
completely unsustainable. That's what he saw.
He believed that online degrees and specialized
corporate training programs would disrupt the
bottom tier of colleges first, and then that
disruption would just march right up market exactly
like the hydraulic excavators did. We are recording
this deep dive in the mid -20s. We are literally
entering that window, he predicted right now.
We really are. And while we haven't seen 2000
actual bankruptcies just yet, we are definitely
seeing massive mergers. We are seeing small liberal
arts colleges close their doors every single
month. We are seeing a huge cultural questioning
of the actual return on investment of a four
year degree. So he might have been a tiny bit
aggressive on the exact timeline, but the trend
line looks alarmingly accurate. It really does.
And he also applied this same exact logic to
health care right in his book. book, The Innovator's
Prescription. Which won awards from the College
of Healthcare Executives. It's the same basic
pattern. General hospitals are like the big traditional
department stores. They try to do everything
for everyone. Right. But doing everything is
incredibly expensive and complex. So he argued
strongly for decentralization. Like what? Specialized
clinics that do one specific thing really well
and really cheap. Standalone orthopedic clinics.
The minute clinics you see inside the pharmacy.
ultimately moving care away from the super expensive
hospital and into the cheaper home environment.
It's all the exact same pattern. Move from complex
and expensive to simple and affordable. That
is the ultimate Christensen signature. Now, before
we move to the final really personal chapter
of his life, we have to talk about one more huge
concept, because aside from disruption, this
is probably his most famous methodology, jobs
to be done. Oh, this is my absolute favorite.
It's just so incredibly human. And we definitely
can't explain this without the milkshake story.
You have to tell the milkshake story for the
listener. It is such a classic. OK, so a big
fast food chain usually thought to be McDonald's,
though he often didn't name them explicitly in
the case study. They wanted to sell more milkshakes.
Seems simple enough. So they did all the traditional
market research. They brought in customers. They
ran focus groups. And they asked them, hey, do
you want it thicker, sweeter? More chocolatey.
Standard focus group stuff. Tell us what you
want. Right. And they made the changes based
on that feedback, and sales did not move at all.
Total flat line. Wow. So they hired Christensen's
firm, and one of his colleagues went and literally
just stood in the restaurant for 18 hours straight.
He just watched people buy milkshakes. That is
dedication. What did he actually see? Well, he
noticed this really weird pattern. A huge chunk
of the milkshakes were sold before eight in the
morning to people who were totally alone. They
bought the single shake they got in their car
and they drove off. So breakfast milkshakes.
Exactly. So the very next day they went back
and confronted these early morning buyers and
they asked this really unusual question. They
asked, excuse me, what job were you trying to
do that caused you to hire this milkshake? That
is such a weird way to phrase it. Why did you
hire that milkshake? It sounds crazy but it got
the real answer. It turned out these specific
people had a long boring drive to work. They
needed something to keep them awake and occupied.
They weren't even really hungry yet, but they
knew they would be by 10 a .m., so they needed
something they could hold in one hand while driving
something that wouldn't get crumbs all over their
work suit, like a bagel or a donut would. And
a milkshake is perfect for that. Yes, because
the milkshake is so thick it literally takes
20 minutes to suck it up through that thin straw.
Wow. It was the absolute perfect tool for the
job. It wasn't about the flavor at all. entirely
about boredom, alleviation, and having a morning
tide me over. So the competitor to that milkshake
wasn't a Burger King milkshake. The competitor
was a banana or a donut or even just listening
to talk radio. Yes, exactly. And once the company
actually understood the job, the customers were
hiring it for, they changed the product, they
made the shakes even thicker so they would last
longer on the commute, and they added chunks
of fruit to make the whole experience more interesting.
And I assume it worked. Sales completely exploded.
The core insight is you don't just analyze the
customer demographics. You have to analyze the
actual job the customer is trying to get done
in their life. It just shifts the focus entirely.
It's so incredibly practical. It is, and it's
that exact practicality, that deep... deep desire
to be truly useful people that really defines
the final act of his own life. Yeah. Because
while his incredible mind was reshaping global
industries, his physical body was really starting
to fail him. This is the hard part of the story.
The timeline of his health in the early 2010s
is just... Brutal. It is relentless. In February
of 2010, he is diagnosed with follicular lymphoma,
which is a serious form of cancer. Then just
five months later in July of 2010, he suffers
a massive ischemic stroke. A stroke? I mean for
a professor, for a guy who makes his living speaking
and writing. It was devastating. It hit the exact
part of his brain that controlled speech. He
developed something called expressive aphasia.
What does that mean exactly? It means he knew
exactly what he wanted to say in his head, but
he physically couldn't get the right words out
of his mouth. He told a story later about lying
inside this MRI machine praying and slowly realizing
that his ability to speak the literal tool of
his entire trade was just gone. He had to relearn
English from scratch, didn't he? Like a young
child. He had to undergo intense speech therapy
to learn grammar and basic vocabulary all over
again. He described the feeling as trying to
find a specific file in a giant file cabin where
all the labels have been completely ripped off.
The irony of that is just heartbreaking. The
man who articulated some of the most complex
management theories of our time suddenly reduced
to complete silence. It is, but he fought back
so hard he treated his own stroke recovery like
a job to be done. Wow. And he did eventually
regain his speech, though he sometimes struggled
to find specific words for the rest of his life.
And then as if all of that wasn't enough, he
later developed leukemia. It's just wave after
wave. But right in the middle of all that suffering,
the cancer, the stroke, the recovery, he writes
a book that I genuinely think will outlast all
of his business books. How Will You Measure Your
Life? Yeah, this came out in 2012. And it started
as a speech he gave to the graduating class at
Harvard Business School, right? It did. He looked
out at the students, and then he looked back
at his own former HBS classmates. These were
the absolute masters of the universe, right?
Right. And he realized that many of them, by
age 50, were totally miserable. They were divorced.
They were estranged from their own kids. Wow.
Some were even in federal prison. Jeffrey Skilling,
the CEO of Enron, was actually in his graduating
class. Oh man, the best and the brightest. And
Christensen asked a very simple question. How
does this happen? How do these incredibly smart,
highly driven people end up totally ruining their
own lives? And what was the answer? He realized
it's the innovator's dilemma all over again.
But how does disruption apply to your family
life? Think about the resource allocation process
we talked about earlier. You as a person have
limited resources. You have your time and your
energy. Right. And naturally, you want to invest
those resources where you get the most immediate,
most tangible return. OK. So if I stay late at
the office and I ship a big new product, I get
a bonus. I get a high five from my boss. I get
a promotion. The feedback loop on that is super
fast. Exactly. But if you go home early to play
catch with your toddler or read them a book,
what's the immediate measurable return? Not much.
The kid cries. I'm exhausted. Right. You don't
see the real result of being a good dad or a
good mom for maybe 20 years. So the margins on
parenting are just really low in the short term.
So rationally, these high achievers pour all
their resources into their careers. They systematically
under invest in their own families. They think,
you know, I'll deal with the family stuff later
once I've made partner or once we go public.
But by the time they finally turn back to their
family, the family is gone. The relationship
has been disrupted by neglect. That is so profound.
We basically bankrupt our own personal lives
because we are constantly chasing the high margin
hits of our career. And he also talked a lot
about personal integrity in that book. He used
this economic concept of marginal cost. How so?
Well, in business, the marginal cost of doing
something just one more time is usually pretty
low. He applied that directly to human ethics.
The cost of breaking your own moral rule just
this once always seems really low in the moment.
Right, like I'll just cheat on this one little
expense report. or I'll just miss this one soccer
game. Exactly. But he argued that the actual
marginal cost of doing something wrong just this
once is almost always infinite. Because once
you break the rule, the rule is permanently gone.
Wow. He decided very early in his life, for example,
that he would never play sports on a Sunday because
of his religious faith. But even when he was
at Oxford? Even at Oxford. The big national championship
game landed on a Sunday, and his coach literally
begged him to play. His teammates begged him.
They said, Clay, just this once, it's for the
national championship. And he was the starting
center. They absolutely needed him. He actually
went to a park nearby and he prayed about it
and he said the answer was a clear no. So he
didn't play. What happened? They actually ended
up winning without him, which he joked kept him
very humble. That's funny. But he said later
that if he had played that one time, he would
have absolutely no defense the next time a conflict
came up. It's so much easier to hold your principles
100 % of the time than it is to hold them 98
% of the time. 100 % is easier than 98%. That
is definitely going to stick with me. It was
the code he lived his entire life by. He was
a bishop in his local church congregation. counselor
in a mission presidency, he was a scoutmaster
for the Boy Scouts for 25 years. Wait, 25 years?
Yes. Think about that. While he was actively
advising Intel and consulting for the White House
and writing bestsellers, he was spending his
Tuesday nights helping 12 -year -olds tie knots
and plan weekend camping trips. That is wild.
He completely refused to outsource his service
to others. He deeply believed that the only real
metric that God would care about at the end wasn't
how much money did you make or how many books
did you sell. What was it? It was simply, how
many individual people did you directly help?
That's the real measure of a life. That's the
measure. He also received the BYU Distinguished
Service Award for what they called his Christ
-like charity. And he left behind an incredible
family. He married Christine Quinn back in 1976,
and they had five children together. And the
sports legacy actually continued with them. It
did. His son Matthew played basketball and was
actually on the Duke University team that won
the 2001 national championship. Oh, that's awesome.
So Clayton Christensen passed away in January
of 2020 from complications of leukemia. But just
looking at the massive stack of sources we've
gone through today. His footprint on the world
is just staggering. It really is. His theories
are discussed in board rooms from Tata... In
political theorists of the last 50 years. He
was ranked number one in the global thinkers
50 list twice in 2011 and 2013. But honestly,
I think his real legacy is that he gave us all
a completely new pair of glasses. How do you
mean? He taught us to look at business failure
not as some sort of moral flaw or incompetence,
but as a predictable structural mechanism. And
even more importantly, he taught us that if we
aren't incredibly careful. The blind pursuit
of success can cost us the very things that actually
make life worth living. So true. He warned us
about the disruption of massive industries, and
then he warned us about the disruption of our
own souls. That is exactly it. Well, I want to
leave you, the listener, with a thought today.
We talked earlier about his really aggressive
prediction for universities, that half of them
would go bankrupt by roughly 2027 to 2032. Right.
We are actively washing that landscape shift
right now, but I want you to try applying the
jobs to be done theory to your own life this
week. Look around at the things you spend your
money on. Look at the big institutions you trust.
Don't ask what is this product. Ask yourself,
what exact job am I hiring this thing to do?
And if you are taking out massive loans to hire
a university to just give you a network. Could
you maybe get that exact same network somewhere
else? Right. Or if you are hiring a complex hospital
to fix a minor ailment, could a simple phone
app do it better and cheaper? Once you start
seeing the actual job, you start seeing the disruption
long before it hits you. Yeah. And maybe just
maybe that's how you avoid the innovator's dilemma
in your own life. Keep your eyes open. Thanks
for deep diving with us today. We'll see you
next time.