Clayton Christensen

Clayton Christensen (1952-2020) was the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where he taught one of the most popular elective classes for second year students; Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise.

When Clayton Christensen almost 20 years ago first described the concept of Disruptive Innovation, it fundamentally questioned our traditional perspective on strategy and innovation. The unpredictable nature and impact of the disruptions and the disrupters paved the way for thinking of and working with strategy in a much more integrated and emergent way than we have been used to.

Disrupt your own business and look for “non-consumption”

To thrive in a world of disruption, we must constantly fight to free ourselves from the pull of the past and challenge our current beliefs, claimed Clayton Christensen. If we manage to successfully disrupt our own business, we may be cutting off the very branch we are sitting on, but at least we are aware of it and can move on to seek new opportunities in new and more profitable markets in time.

To do that successfully, we need to build agile organisations, where resources seamlessly can be moved from less profitable areas to opportunities of growth, and we must be innovative and far-sighted enough to see beyond the obvious needs of our current customers to seemingly uninteresting markets and segments of non-consumption.

At Implement, we share this view. During the last two or three decades, we have experienced an increase in the frequency and magnitude of major changes unparalleled in history. We see disruptions and disruptive innovation as natural consequences of that development and as an emphasis of the importance of changing the way we work with strategy, innovation and change. Today, more than 2/3 of our change initiatives do not live up to their stated objectives.

Read more about Clayton Christensen on his own website