In Defense of Clay Christensen: Even the ‘Nicest Man Ever to Lecture’ at Harvard Can’t Innovate without Upsetting a Few People
I wrote a version of this first as a blog post. I am delighted that my new editor at Quartz, Paul Smalera, liked it enough to publish it in Quartz. (My previous editor, Mitra Kalita, is now overseeing key aspects of Quartz’s global expansion.)
By the way, since I am blogging through Clay’s books (as I have been blogging through John Stuart Mill's On Liberty) I have a virtual sub-blog on Clay Christensen:
http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/tagged/clay
In the column, I give my take on Clay’s theory, which I think is important for economists to understand. Here is a teaser:
My views on Clay as a thinker come from reading six of Clay’s books this year …
As an economist, I found them fascinating. One of the hottest areas of economics in the last twenty years has been the border between economics and psychology. One basic idea at that intersection is that people have limitations in their ability to process information and make decisions. This idea that cognition is finite is a key issue in macroeconomics, as Noah Smith and I wrote about in “The Shakeup at the Minneapolis Fed and the Battle for the Soul of Macroeconomics—Again.” But the idea of finite cognition also matters a lot for businesses. Some decisions are hard even for people who spend their careers making those kinds of decisions, and the support of teams of experts.
Clay, in the management theory he has developed with various coauthors, identifies one key factor in how hard a decision is for a generally well-run business …