Alec Hogg interviews Clay Christensen on disruption, education, SA

Clayton Christensen – The Father of Distruption

I recently caught up with my long time hero, the world’s leading business thinker, Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen. Here is my interview for CNBC Africa. It was supposed to be 30 minutes but the event (sponsored by Accenture) was running hours late because of loadshedding-affected traffic problems. So we started late, were shoved into an inappropriate cubicle with no protection from thumping seminar music and just as the interview started hitting full stride, Clay was called away. So here’s the seven minutes that were edited together from our truncated chat. Am really hoping to get another chance to spend quality time with this hugely influential, humble man who talks here about disruption, education and South Africa. – Alec Hogg

It is extraordinary how your work has shot into the limelight. ‘The father of disruption’, you’re called. Do you think it’s been overdone – the focus on disruption around the world?

Well, yes and no. People use it in ways that are not meaningful. They don’t even take the time to understand what disruption means and then they apply it in any way so that they can justify whatever it is that they want to do, in the first place. This happens often. Michael Porter had a word, called ‘strategic’ and people who want to justify whatever they want to do, say it’s ‘a strategic investment’. Thomas Kuhn gave us a word, called ‘paradigm’ and it’s misused. Disruption is being misused a lot. The impact its had is because it’s a good theory. It really is a piece of work that describes causality in an important part of a manager’s life.

‘Innovator’s dilemma’: your bestseller, which is one of Top 5 business books of all time, according to most analysts. I guess that’s more what you’d like to be known as – as a person who’s promoted innovation, rather than changing society.

That’s right.

The world needs it right now, more than ever.

Absolutely. It does. You have the next generation coming up, needing to get jobs, and if we don’t solve the innovation paradox, a whole generation of people won’t have jobs. Innovation is what causes jobs to emerge.

With machines increasingly taking over the jobs done by human beings, how do you see a solution to this dilemma?

It’s a good question. On every dimension, there is consumption and there is non-consumption. I’ll give you a silly example. One of my students loves art and she decided that there was an enormous amount of non-consumption of art. What she meant by that is when you move into a new apartment or a house, there’s a big wall with nothing on it and so you go out and find a piece of art and stick it there. For the next three weeks, whenever you pass it you stop, look at it, and say ‘boy, that’s beautiful’ and you’re consuming art. However, after about three weeks, you forget it’s there and yet, you don’t go and buy another one because it’s occupied and you become a non-consumer of art. What she said was ‘I’m going to start a company that makes it easy for more people to consume art’, and so she sells them a flat panel display/high-definition and every three weeks, you get another piece of art. Non-consumption became consumption again. When you think about it in that way, there are huge amounts of non-consumption of many things in the world and if we make it easier and simpler for more people to consume whatever we’re talking about, there’s growth. There’s a lot of non-consumption of education, for example. If we make it easier, simpler, and more effective to consume education, a staggering industry would become alive.

That’s something you talk a lot about – education. In fact, I’ve watched one of your videos where you said that the Harvard Business School (your own employer) is under threat.

Oh, it is. One of the biggest problems in society and in our lives is that somebody in the past decided to separate things that should be together, or put things together that should be separate. That’s created a lot of problems. For example, somebody decided that you have the Sunni’s, Shi’ites, and Kurds. Let’s just put them all together and we’ll call it Iraq. Putting them together when they should be separate, has caused all kinds of problems. Somebody in the past decided that education should begin when you’re admitted to school, ends when you graduate, and then you have your job. God didn’t put the boundary there. Somebody did, but it wasn’t God. We need to just learn how to provide education about management through the entire life of a manager’s career. So that they’d learn from us and we’d learn from them rather than regarding education as an event that has a beginning and an end.

It’s lifelong learning.

That’s right and it’s really important for all of us.

Clay, in South Africa we have a great need here for different thinking/innovative thinking. Perhaps political ideology or our history is shaping the way some of the leaders are taking this country. How do you open one’s eyes rather than what business is doing here (almost trying to poke them out with a stick)?

Firstly, data will never solve this problem because data is only available about the past. Data is always incomplete and if you try to win an argument with data; the next day, they use data to reverse whatever it was you’d accomplished so that doesn’t work. What does work, however, is you need to have a theory of causality – what causes things and why.

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