Clayton Christensen

The Harvard Business School theorist of disruptive innovation, and one of the most cross-referenced authors in Kyle’s library. As an author he appears via How Will You Measure Your Life? — his values-as-strategy book — whose “how will you measure your life” frame Kyle invokes directly in The Self-Driven Child notes (“How will your kids measure their life?”). His signature work The Innovator’s Dilemma threads through the business reading: in both The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound, Jeff Bezos “devoured and raptly discussed” it with his executives, using its logic — great companies fail by refusing to cannibalize their own businesses — to justify the Kindle (“kill your own business”) and Barnes & Noble’s failure to compete online.

The library also captures Christensen’s range and his self-revision. Catastrophic Care quotes him on how the Medicaid lowest-price rule instills pricing “discipline” that makes discounting prohibitively expensive across health care. Flying Blind traces how his “skate to where the money will be” framing inspired Boeing’s financialization — and then how he recanted in “The Capitalist’s Dilemma” (2014), arguing for market-creating over efficiency innovations and conceding “a lot of the blame… rests with our great schools of business, including our own.” The Next Mormons presents another side entirely: Christensen the devout Latter-day Saint and New England church leader, whose diagnosis tied single-member activity rates to whether singles were given real callings.

Context: Clayton M. Christensen (1952–2020) was a Harvard Business School professor who coined the theory of “disruptive innovation” in The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997); he was also a prominent Latter-day Saint who served in church leadership.

Where this appears

• How Will You Measure Your Life? — his values-as-strategy book; the “measure your life” frame
• The Self-Driven Child — the “measure your life” question applied to parenting
• The Everything Store · Amazon Unbound — The Innovator’s Dilemma as Bezos’s strategic playbook (Kindle, self-cannibalization)
• Catastrophic Care — quoted on Medicaid pricing “discipline” and its discounting distortion
• Flying Blind — “skate to where the money will be,” then his “Capitalist’s Dilemma” recant
• The Next Mormons — Christensen as Mormon church leader; callings and singles’ activity rates