WHEN HE WAS 34 years old, Clayton Christensen started a company with a few MIT professors called Ceramics Process Systems Corporation. “I was the business guy,” he explains. “We were making new products out of advanced materials. In that market niche, we were the only ones to succeed: we beat DuPont, Alcoa, Hoechst. I could not explain this by our having smarter people. The other companies had smart owners and smart managers, too. How could smart people fail? I started to think about other industries where talented leaders had failed—were they actually stupid managers?”
Image: Illustration by Taylor Callery
To read the original article: Clayton Christensen on disruptive innovation | Harvard Magazine Jul-Aug 2014
