PERSON
Clayton Christensen
The Harvard Business School professor who built a theory of how good companies are destroyed by good decisions—the architect of disruptive innovation, jobs-to-be-done, and the value network, whose framework has proven more precisely diagnostic of the AI transition than of any disruption it was originally designed to describe.
Clayton Christensen spent four decades asking one question with the persistence of a scientist and the clarity of a teacher: why do excellent, well-managed companies fail? Not because of complacency, not because of strategic blindness, not because of incompetence—but because their managers made exactly the right decisions for the business they had, while those decisions made it structurally impossible to survive the market transition arriving from below. His answer, the theory of
disruptive innovation, built from meticulous empirical research on disk drives, steel mills, and the retail industry, identified a pattern consistent enough across diverse contexts to deserve recognition as one of the most robust findings in management science: incumbents are trapped not by their blindness but by their rationality. His
jobs-to-be-done framework provided the complementary lens—people do not buy products, they hire products to accomplish progress in their lives, and the competitor for any job is not