His brother, Carlton, told the Deseret News that Christensen died Thursday evening of complications from cancer in Boston, Massachusetts, where he had been a notable part of the Latter-day Saint community for over 40 years. He was considered an equally robust spiritual thinker.
The two men appeared together on the cover of Forbes magazine in — and both Christensen and the business world were changed forever. Five years ago, the Economist said it had long since entered the zeitgeist. Though he coined the term, Christensen grew uncomfortable with it as he saw it overused and misapplied. He utilized it narrowly to describe innovations that upended existing markets, but only if they fit a certain pattern he had discovered.
A true disruptive innovation, he taught, first appealed only to a niche market and appeared less attractive than the powerful incumbent it eventually usurped.
In fact, the incumbent typically looked down on it as inconsequential until it ate up huge swaths of its market share. He shared his case studies with roomfuls of CEOs. His story about the disruption of steel mills gripped Grove, for example. Into this chaos and uncertainty came Christensen, telling his story about the steel industry. Grove applied that story to help Intel ward off a disruption that could have undone the company. Grove then identified low-end personal computers as a potential disruptive innovation that threatened the high-end computer chip maker, and he instructed his managers and sales team to focus on them.
Soon, Intel introduced the cheaper Celeron chip. Christensen died nearly a month after Gary Starkweather, the man whose idea for the laser printer made Xerox a powerhouse.
Eventually, the powerhouse printer company became the subject of another Christensen story on a disrupted industry. Through his research and teaching, he fundamentally shaped the practice of business and influenced generations of students and scholars. Disruptive innovation became a ubiquitous term. Others complained it was overused. Various forms of it regularly pop up in discussions about sports, for example. And I plead with Him that He would bless me.
And the next day, as I opened the exams, every one of the questions that the examiners threw at me was a question that I had come to know that they would ask. And the lesson that I learned from this is that when Heavenly Father invited us to seek first the kingdom of God, and promises us that all these other things will be added to us that He was dead serious. That is a promise that we can bank on. And I incite you, my brothers and sisters, that when you find yourself confronted with a conflict between the pursuit of a career and the pursuit of magnifying your calling in the kingdom of God, that if you will believe God, and trust in Him, He will bless you in ways that are beyond your comprehension.
The fourth decision I made for which I am very grateful was also one that I made when I was at Oxford. So I tried out for and made the Oxford Varsity basketball team.
We had a great team. We marched through each of those games in a fairly easy fashion until we came to the final four, and then kind of cluelessly I looked at the schedule to find out when the games were scheduled, and to my horror saw that the final basketball game was scheduled to be played on Sunday in Bristol.
And I was devastated because I had made a commitment to myself when I was 16 that I would never play basketball on Sunday. So I told my coach about this conflict and asked him what I should do. And he was just incredulous. He lets us by on things like this. And Clay, just this once, just this once, play this game and then go off and do whatever you have to do with your god and make peace with him and never do it again.
Well, then we played in the semi-final game, and my friend who was the back-up center got up-ended on a rebound and fell down on his shoulder and dislocated his shoulder, which then increased the pressure for me to play that game.
So I went back into my hotel room after that game and knelt down and asked Heavenly Father if it would be all right, just this once, if I played that game on Sunday. You know the answer. And the reason that decision has proven so important to me is that my whole life has turned out to be an un-ending stream of extenuating circumstances, and had I crossed that line just that once, then the next time something came up that was so demanding and critical, it would have been so much easier to cross the line again.
The lesson is it really is easier to keep the commandments percent of the time than it is 98 percent of the time. The fifth decision that I wanted to recount for you, was the decision I made to call myself on a mission again. I served a wonderful mission in Korea. As I mentioned I did most of it only being able to say that I believed the Book of Mormon was true, and I testified of those things that I knew to be true, and I felt the Spirit with me almost everyday when I was a missionary. But when I returned I began to feel the Spirit less and less as my life progressed.
We moved to Boston and I enrolled in the MBA program at Harvard, and I was called at the time to serve as a counselor to our bishop, and I was a busy guy. I just did everything I could to magnify my calling. I was studying the scriptures everyday, I was praying, and yet on a day to day basis it just seemed like I was feeling the Spirit less and less as time wore on.
Then we moved to Washington and I had the chance to take a job in the Reagan Administration. All of a sudden we were living with new people and I was working with new people and I was riding in on the bus with new people, and it gave me many more opportunities than I had had living in a stable situation in Boston to begin talking with people about my church.
With his passing, we felt it was only appropriate to publish the last part of that interview. And has that gotten in the way of your work in any way? Christensen: I deeply believe there is a God. Harvard is an interesting place because it obviously has a school of divinity. Kim Clark was the dean of Harvard Business School and a mormon. And yet I think a lot of the rest of the country probably thinks of Harvard as a very a-religious, atheistic kind of place. Is there any discontinuity between being deeply religious in a place like Harvard?
What I find is actually when I give a presentation at the school or out of the school, I always try to reference in some way or signal to people in the audience that I actually believe in God.
Do you think about that? I think about it a lot. So the application of the theory of disruption has been, if you look historically when Christ established his church in the time of the New Testament, the traditional church of Judaism was a concentrated church.
And then what happened is, as Christ was killed and the control of the church moved toward Rome, a Christian church became centralized. And the people who were in the middle had all of the power and they determined what people could and could not read and made the scriptures inaccessible to the masses.
And then when the Protestant reformation came in, like Luther, they tried to decentralize the church again, but then over time Protestant churches got centralized. There was a kind of comfort watching them talk with one another, their low voices rumbling beneath the shrieks of children running through the living room while cousins and aunts played card games at the dining room table.
As siblings, they all fit there, somehow, in that house where they grew up. It was home. One Sunday afternoon when my uncle was in town, the house was quieter than usual. I sat on a kitchen stool in a purple flower skirt and a white shirt feeling a little out of place as the adults around me talked, until my uncle Clayton asked how I was doing.
And as a year-old at that time, feeling noticed was exactly what I needed. Somehow, I think he knew that. He was just my uncle. I heard stories of how as a teenager he floated down the Jordan River to the Great Salt Lake just for fun in a canoe with my dad. Their pants got so salty from the trip that they could partially stand them up on the shore of Antelope Island before they went to sleep at night.
As a boy, he and his siblings would regularly help their dad with his work as division merchandise manager at ZCMI, the first department store in the United States. As I got older, my relationship with my uncle changed and I came to understand and appreciate his ideas more.
On occasion, he advised me on what to do when I had no idea what career path to take. We sat together on a couch in his New England-style home in Belmont, Massachusetts, a rug beneath our feet, as we explored his ideas. I loved the way he used his hands as he spoke.
They were such big hands. Gentle hands. Although he may have written books and addressed large crowds, my uncle Clayton spoke just like anybody else. Not once did he ever talk down to you.
When I think of my uncle, I also think of his sense of humor. My aunt Christine prepared us breakfast of broiled grapefruit with brown sugar and locally made yogurt.
Having never been a morning person, I woke up late and moseyed into their kitchen, not realizing that everyone had waited for me to be ready so we could have breakfast together.
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