How Will You Measure Your Life?

Clayton M. Christensen was a renowned academic. In 2010, he was diagnosed with a cancer similar to the kind that claimed the life of his father. That same year, he also suffered an ischemic stroke while writing How Will You Measure Your Life? that compromised his ability to speak and write. For this reason, he employed the services of James Allworth and Karen Dillon to help finish the book. While both Allworth and Dillon are credited as co-authors, Christensen writes in the first person, and writes about his own family, childhood, and faith. In 2020, Christensen passed away from complications of cancer.

In the book, Christensen discusses his own career path, noting that when he graduated from Harvard, he intended to become an editor for The Wall Street Journal. After other opportunities presented themselves, specifically the chance to help operate a start-up company called CPS Technologies, he eventually returned to Harvard as a professor at its business school. He uses his teaching career and end-of-the-year class discussion to help inform the content of the book.

As an academic, Christensen was most notable for his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In it, he explores the paradox that many large companies found themselves in as smaller start-ups emerged and competed for the same market share. The book was successful, and The Economist magazine named it as “one of the six most important business books ever written” (Rifkin, Gregory. “Clayton Christensen, Guru of ‘Disruptive Innovation,’ Dies at 67.” The New York Times, 27 Jan. 2020). Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, also considered the book influential, stating that it “was the most important book he had read” when it was first published (Rifkin). The concept of disruptive innovation asserts “that the factors that help the best companies succeed […] are the same reasons some of these companies fail” (Rifkin).

Christensen is also known for introducing the idea of “disruptive technologies” and how these can pose challenges for established, large companies. A disruptive technology helps “a startup with limited resources […] aim at technology disruption by inventing an entirely new way of getting something done” (Smith, Tim. “Disruptive Technology: Definition, Example, and How to Invest.” Investopedia, 2 Apr. 2022). As the start-up takes more and more of the market share, larger companies struggle to adjust, and sometimes the start-up supplants the larger company’s dominance in the market. In the book, Christensen uses the fall of video rental giant Blockbuster as an example. Upstart Netflix arrived on scene and sought to “target overlooked customer segments and gain an industry presence” (Smith). Netflix presented a different model for video rental, which included use of the post office and a monthly subscription fee, and Blockbuster could not adjust because they would be competing against their own stores if they adopted this model. Eventually, Blockbuster collapsed and Netflix gained dominance of the video rental market.