Missing Those We Never Met

We have a memorial hymn that applies this week. It begins,

Each life that touches ours for good

Reflects thine own great mercy, Lord;

Thou sendest blessings from above

Thru words and deeds of those who love.

On Saturday, the world lost basketball great Kobe Bryant, along with his daughter and a total of 9 in a helicopter crash. I don’t have a lot to say, except that it’s tragic when accidents like this happen. All of these people will have close loved ones that will feel the pain of loss, and we send our sympathies. I don’t know the beliefs of those in the accident, but the evidence is they touched many lives for good.

I was already planning to talk about missing a good person who passed away last week—another person I never met, but who touched many lives for good. Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor, died January 23, at age 67, following a fight with cancer. There’s a nice obituary piece in the Deseret News, in which I got some of this information.

Clay Christensen, at Governor's Utah Economic Summit in 2014
image from here

Christensen is best known for the term “disruptive innovation.” He introduced this term in 1995, in Harvard Business Review, and much of his work since has been related to refining and applying the concept. It has since become part of the vocabulary, although he was personally uncomfortable with how ubiquitous and misused the term became. He intended it to refer to a smaller niche in the market, not every disruption or every market success.

The way he described it, a smaller, insignificant looking startup would go up against an industry giant. The big guy might even look down with superiority, as though the little guy wasn’t worth his attention. But, then, the new little guy’s innovation catches on and takes over, and the giant company falls Goliath-style.

One of the most cited examples is Netflix, coming on the scene when Blockbuster was the market controller with no apparent sign of yielding. Now Blockbuster is gone and Netflix is a large part of the new streaming industry.

Another example was Intel, which moved toward producing chips for personal computers, rather than focusing on larger computers, or mainframes. (Do young people even know what those were?)

The professor had a way of looking at things—and explaining them—that hadn’t been thought of by others. He’s the author of several books, and an institute for studying and spreading the ideas—which we can be grateful for.

One non-management book he wrote was a self-help book called How Will You Measure Your Life? And he did an inspirational Tedx talk on that subject as well. At the end of that, he concluded that, when he meets with God at the end of his life, they’ll be looking together at how he used the characteristics God gave him to bless the lives of others—touching lives for good.

Clay Christensen giving Tedx talk "How Will You Measure Your Life?"
screenshot from here

Back in October, I heard him quoted on the radio show STA Money Hour. I quoted parts of that particular show, on capitalism, a few months ago. But within that broadcast, where they quoted Professor Christensen, they said this: 

If you look at Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. He said—and it’s Harvard Business—he talks about the prosperity paradox. He writes of poor, developing nations, “It may sound counterintuitive, but enduring prosperity from many nations will not come from fixing poverty. By investing and market creating innovations, investors and entrepreneurs inadvertently engage in nation building. Entrepreneurs and businesses don’t have to set out to improve the world.” He says, “Through their collective efforts of making useful goods and services, an improved world is the outcome.” Why is that so hard to grasp?

As I say here at the Spherical Model, following the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization will lead to the solutions to world problems better than focusing on solving those problems. So those things first, and then see if there are specific helps for specific people that can be undertaken.

Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School, says this:

Clayton’s brilliance and kindness were equally evident to everyone he met, and his legacy will be long-lasting. Through his research and teaching, he fundamentally shaped the practice of business and influenced generations of students and scholars.

In 2012 Professor Christensen was named the world’s most influential living management thinker. It has been noted that he wrote about giant companies that fail, while he was both an influential giant and physical giant at 6’8” tall.

His way of thinking came from his religious thought, which is how I came to know of him. He was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which I also am. This informed his thinking, but he was able to express it in ways that people of other beliefs could easily grasp.

Clark Gilbert, who considered him a mentor, said,

People who didn’t believe in God or who weren’t religious found themselves reflecting on spiritual ideas because of the conversations and writings of Clay Christensen. How Will You Measure Your Life influenced so many people. He had this ability to unapologetically and with deep conviction and courage talk about things of faith and of God with people who didn’t think they were religious. He found ways of not only engaging them personally but engaging them intellectually in a way that caused them to start to really, actually think about spiritual matters in a way that they never would have without someone like Clay.

In a piece on religious freedom, in 2014, I quoted and included a short video, provided by People of Faith, which I’d like to repeat here today. He often used stories to explain things, as he does here:

Some time ago I had a conversation with a Marxist economist from China. He was coming to the end of a Fulbright fellowship here in Boston. And I asked him if he had learned anything that was surprising or unexpected. And without any hesitation, he said, “Yea. I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy."

“The reason why democracy works,” he said, “is not because the government was designed to oversee what everybody does, but, rather, democracy works because most people, most of the time, voluntarily choose to obey the law. And in your past, most Americans attended a church or synagogue every week, and they were taught there by people who they respected.”

My friend went on to say that Americans follow these rules because they had come to believe that they weren’t just accountable to society; they were accountable to God.

My Chinese friend heightened a vague but nagging concern I’ve harbored inside that, as religion loses its influence over the lives of Americans, what will happen to our democracy? Where are the institutions that are going to teach the next generation of Americans that they too need to voluntarily choose to obey the laws? Because, if you take away religion, you can’t hire enough police.