Clayton Christensen Changed a Lot of Minds, Including Mine

The business world is littered with companies that failed to change as markets transformed around them – Kodak, Toy ‘R Us, Blockbuster, Circuit City and US Steel are just a few. One company that made reactive changes when needed was computer chip giant Intel. Smaller companies were making inroads with less expensive, or low-end computer chips, and beginning to challenge Intel’s lock on the high-end, high margin chip. Intel was faced with choices that unanswered might have undone the company. Should they hold on to their high margin business, drop prices, or something else?

They chose to do something else. Intel took the rare step of creating Celeron, a new less expensive chip to thwart the up-and-coming competitors. Within a year, Intel captured 35% of the market for cheaper chips pushing the start-ups down and solidifying its dominance. While Intel’s CEO at the time, Andy Grove, made the final decision, he credited a meeting with Clayton Christensen, a Harvard professor and author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” with opening his eyes to needed transformation.

Christensen did the same sort of thing for many top executives including Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Netflix’s Reed Hastings.

Christensen opened many eyes, including mine. Having spent much of my career in the legacy business of commercial radio, I was soaking it all in as he presented at a Borrell Media conference 7 years ago about changes that would most certainly impact local media. His presentation started me down a path thinking about the threats and opportunities beyond AM/FM.

Audio streaming was nascent but clearly growing. On the TV side, Netflix was exploding with “on-demand” TV propelled by their 2013 release of “House of Cards.” It seemed only logical that “on-demand” audio would be a thing. NPR was already making great inroads.

One year later, Amplifi Media was born.

Clayton Christensen passed away on Friday at 67. Here is a great example of his wisdom from 2013.

The Economist called “The Innovators Dilemma” one of the top six business books of all time. He followed with several more. Always thoughtful and pragmatic.

Thanks for the push Clayton.