Clayton Christensen Profile in the New Yorker
“Christensen is a Mormon.” It’s got a Danish great-grandfather pulling a hand cart, courting a girl from a family of fourteen, and praying nightly about the truth of the Book of Mormon until “One evening in October, 1975, as I sat in the chair and opened the book following my prayer, I felt a marvelous spirit come into the room and envelop my body. I had never before felt such an intense feeling of peace and love. I started to cry, and did not want to stop. I knew then, from a source of understanding more powerful than anything I had ever felt in my life, that the book I was holding in my hands was true.”
More good stuff such as dealing with death as a believing Mormon. New Yorker readers will be more edified than usual. Also a bunch of disruptive innovation.
Vader
May 8, 2017
“The late Theodore Levitt, of Harvard Business School, liked to quote to his students the adage that a person doesn’t want a quarter-inch drill; he wants a quarter-inch hole.”
Classic.
John Mansfield
May 9, 2017
The following paragraph was a nice synthesis of Christensen’s business study and Mormonism, and makes me think of the challenge when scruffy virtuousness is followed by stable prosperity:
“Another thing he worried about in both businesses and families was outsourcing. Look at Dell: over the years, the company had outsourced more and more of its manufacturing to a company in Taiwan—its returns increasing each time, as it focussed on higher-level activities like design and marketing—until in the end the Taiwanese firm started making its own computers for less money. When he thought about Dell, he thought about how, when he and Christine were first married, she had made most of the family’s clothes, and they had picked apples and made applesauce, and picked tomatoes and made tomato sauce, but then store-bought clothes and applesauce and tomato sauce became so cheap that it seemed crazy to keep making them at home. Luckily, they had bought two wrecks of houses and fixed them up themselves, so there had always been Sheetrocking or plastering or painting to do with the kids, but he knew that most of his students would consider this a waste of time. Wanting their children to spend their extracurricular hours in the most profitable way, they would pay for lessons and smart, enriching activities, and they would outsource the low-end, dumb tasks like mowing the lawn and mending clothes, and the children would grow up without knowing how to solve practical problems by themselves, or do something they didn’t enjoy or thought they weren’t going to be good at.”
G.
May 9, 2017
@JM,
I’m very grateful for this link.