Thanks to Will for passing this along.
On
a warm April evening, Clayton Christensen arrived at his home in Belmont,
Mass., desperate for a peanut butter sandwich. Christensen is diabetic, and
with his blood sugar low, he seemed out of sorts. As he crushed the sandwich in
a few massive bites, it had the effect on him that spinach does on Popeye. No
longer confused about why a reporter had been waiting on his stoop, the
60-year-old Harvard Business School professor and celebrated author of The Innovator’s Dilemma began to form
his thoughts with two distractingly huge hands. He said that he’d sometimes
regretted calling his most admired theory “disruptive innovation,” because the disruptive part strikes some as more
alarming than advantageous. He confided that he read the entire World Book Encyclopedia by age 12. And
he shared two intimate encounters he’d had with God, including one on the eve
of a “widow-maker” heart attack in 2007, the first of three life-threatening
health issues in as many years.
