Clayton Christensen

Why Clayton is the canonical Strategy Consultant

Clayton Magleby Christensen (April 6, 1952 – January 23, 2020) was an American academic and business consultant who became the most influential strategy thinker on technology adoption of his generation. Born in Salt Lake City and educated at Brigham Young University (where he graduated summa cum laude in economics), he went on to earn a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford and an MBA with high distinction from Harvard Business School, before completing his Doctor of Business Administration at Harvard in 1992. He joined the HBS faculty that same year, achieved tenure in 1998, and held the Kim B. Clark Professorship of Business Administration until his death.

Christensen’s career as a Strategy Consultant — in the deepest sense of the role — rested on two intellectual frameworks that remapped how executives, investors, and boards think about competitive threats. His 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma introduced the theory of disruptive innovation: the counter-intuitive finding that well-managed incumbent companies systematically fail not because of incompetence but because rational resource-allocation processes make them structurally blind to low-end and new-market entrants. The Economist called it “the most influential business idea of the early 21st century” and named Christensen “the most influential management thinker of his time.” He was ranked number one on the Thinkers50 list in both 2011 and 2013. His second major contribution, the Jobs to Be Done framework, reframed the unit of analysis for innovation from products and customer segments to the functional, social, and emotional progress a customer is trying to make — reorienting product strategy, marketing, and competitive analysis in industries from healthcare to education. These frameworks were not background research delivered to clients through intermediaries: Christensen co-founded Innosight, a management consulting and training firm built explicitly around deploying disruptive-innovation theory in client engagements, and Rose Park Advisors, an investment firm applying the same research to private-market capital allocation. He also served on the boards of Tata Consultancy Services and Franklin Covey, and published ten books including Disrupting Class (2008) and The Innovator’s Prescription (2009), extending his frameworks into public-sector disruption.

In 2010 Christensen was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma and suffered an ischemic stroke the same year. He continued to teach, publish, and consult through a decade of illness. He died on January 23, 2020, at the age of 67, from complications of leukemia. His frameworks remain the dominant intellectual architecture for advising companies navigating technology cycles — precisely the role of the Strategy Consultant: delivering recommendations so consequential they outlast their author.

The Strategy Consultant sells ideas — frameworks, analyses, board-level recommendations under a firm's brand. See the Strategy Consultant role →

Same role, different wave