Never meet your heroes. So goes the saying.
For they’re sure to disappoint you, some say.
The advice lives on because some men found their heroes to be made of clay. The exalted heroes they had imagined, with the glow of monochrome Clark Gable luminescence were suddenly all drab and bored. Their imagined heroes were no more. When your heroes fade in such a way, I suppose that what transpires is not just a failure of a single hero, but the collapse of an entire model of heroism.
Yet, there are heroes that perfectly demolish the myth above. Giant souls who expand the horizons of our thought: They prove that genius, humility, and compassion can all at once reside in our frail bodies. We then wonder. Why aren’t we more like our heroes? Why aren’t we better? We pontificate as we watch those heroes embody our most exalted aspirations.
The air of their verve fills the vacuum of our minds. Their consummate dedication colors in contrast to our wretched half-hardheartedness.
Clay Christensen, who passed away recently, was one such hero.
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Christensen was almost the only Professor, indeed from the Technology and Operations field, whose impact not only transcended across fields of business but also influenced practice and heralded the notion of well-examined life. This is an extraordinary human achievement at its best.
I spent several months in my grad school studying his book, reading his thesis and his articles, trying to absorb the stories of steel and disk disruptions from the low end, admiring his striking and original thoughts. As Paul Graham put it best as he often does, Clay Christensen invented a lot of the ideas that people in the startup world take for granted.
Yet, he was humble in his outlook. He took pains to belabor the limits of his theory. He felt that many over-employed his theories to explain every disruption when an incumbent stumbled. He emphasized that disruptive innovation was not just an idea, but a process. He argued that new breakthroughs often come through low-end footholds, which incumbents tend to ignore. The disruption came from below — from a place of low quality.
My favorite example is from the movies. Think of those days, now unimaginable, when Blockbuster video stores meant instant gratification. There was a Blockbuster store in nearly every neighborhood. To rent a new movie, you just walked over to the nearest store. On the other hand, renting movies from Netflix meant that you had to wait a couple of days until the DVDs in your queue showed up in the mail. Before expanding to the masses who now binge on thoroughly middle-brow content streaming in incessant sequence, NetFlix catered to those discerning few who cared about the letterbox format and did not mind waiting a while to watch a Kurosawa film. As a customer, you even paid for the time in the mail, when you had to wait. The attack on Blockbuster came from the trenches below, soldiering on the people who did not mind the inconvenience.
Eventually, Christensen exceeded even his remarkable disruptive innovation framework with his crowning achievement.
During the earlier part of the last decade, a newly tenured faculty, I read his short book, “How to measure your life”, synthesized in this article on HBR (and a related TED talk video that covers the same themes). For many rudderless boats tossing in the sea of doubt, Prof. Christensen’s faith was a lighthouse, bright, disarming, and unchanging.
He warned against situational ethics and marginal analyses. He exhorted people to invest more in others, and dedicate themselves to deep commitments. Marriage, family, parenthood, patriotism, friendship, trust, faith, truth, and justice. These bonds require not eliding transactions and empty tokenisms, but our fullest willingness.
The word “career” does not figure in the above list.
In academic environments, often immodestly bent towards advancing careers, this de-deification of career is what made Christensen genuine.
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The biggest lesson that I learned from Prof. Christensen was not the theory of disruption or the spirit of entrepreneurship. It was to keep oneself in studied balance, for he showed our best strength was our worst enemy.
He demonstrated the chasm between wisdom and knowledge.
Knowledge expands our mind and makes us think that the world’s our crucible. Wisdom humbles us.
With wisdom, we see that we are but a flickering spark of fire, barely spreading any warmth. And, Clay, he had the warmth of a thousand suns.