Weekend Leadership Reading: Clay Christensen’s Work and Legacy 1/31//20

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Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular workdays. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about Clay Christensen’s work and legacy.

A Short Video to Get a Sense of Who Clay Christensen Was

How Will You Measure Your Life? Clay Christensen at TEDxBoston

The Obituaries

From the Deseret News: Clayton Christensen dies at 67 after lifetime of business, spiritual influence

“Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Netflix’s Reed Hastings and Intel’s Andy Grove looked to influential management thinker.”

From The New York Times: Clayton Christensen, Guru of ‘Disruptive Innovation,’ Dies at 67

“He broke ground with his assertion that the factors that helped the best companies succeed were also the reasons some of those same companies failed.”

From David Whelan: Clayton Christensen: The Survivor

“Christensen’s work took on new urgency the past few years as he suffered a heart attack followed by cancer followed by a stroke. For Christensen it was not a reason to get too upset. It was another opportunity, in a lifetime full of them, to gain insight into how to make the world work better. Because of his July stroke it took a long time for Christensen to be ready to sit down with FORBES. He was in intensive speech therapy, eight hours a day at the beginning. But he graciously agreed to tell his inspiring story in January, the same month he went back to teaching. Here it is in his words, along with those of his family, friends and close colleagues.”

The Remembrances and Articles

From Karen Dillon: What Clayton Christensen Taught Me

“I first walked into Clay’s office a decade ago, when I was the editor of Harvard Business Review and in search of an extra article to help fill out a pending double issue of the magazine. It was the spring of 2010, and I was curious how the soon-to-be-graduating class was feeling about heading back into a world crippled by the recession. I’d heard from Harvard Business School students that Clay had been asked to speak to the graduating class and that the students had been extraordinarily moved by what he said. When I sat down in his office that day, I was focused on my deadline. When I left, an hour and a half later, I was focused on my life.”

From Christian Sandström: The man who changed disruption—and saw his own theories get disrupted

“When I heard that Clayton Christensen had died—aged 67, from complications caused by the leukemia he had been fighting for some time—I thought about my experience in Boston back in 2012. After all, if we are going to discuss his legacy, that first and only impression seems as a good point to start as any.”

From Frances Bridges: Lessons From Clayton Christensen’s ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’

“Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen, whose groundbreaking 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma introduced the concept of disruptive innovation, and whose 2012 book and Harvard Business Review article titled ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’ inspired his students and readers to apply the theories of business to their personal lives, and to pursue purpose and meaning in their work passed away on Saturday. He has inspired entrepreneurs and readers around the world to pursue purpose and meaning, and to ask the difficult questions to find better answers and strategies in their careers and their personal lives. There are so many things Dr. Christensen taught, but below are a few particularly poignant lessons he imparts for those in pursuit of a meaningful life:”

Clay Christensen’s Articles and Books

From the Harvard Business Review: The Essential Clayton Christensen Articles

“Clayton Christensen died on Jan. 23, 2020. Here we present some of his seminal HBR articles through an adaptation of the introduction to the book The Clayton M. Christensen Reader.”

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton Christensen

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice by Clayton Christensen, Karen Dillon, Taddy Hal, and David S. Duncan

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

The Clay Christensen Institute

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Every Monday, I do a blog post about business reading and business books. Follow this link to my review of Dangerous Games.

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