The Harvard Business School professor and devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints could not have been more out of place with his suit attire amongst the tech people....
In an address at Harvard, Christensen argued that the short-term thinking that causes business failure also causes individual failure: “It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, ‘I raised a good son or a good daughter.’ The measure of your life (by God) would be how many people you have helped or served in your life, not the financial counts nor your position in the org chart of businesses.Christensen has also promoted a philosophy of the well-lived life, one that prizes the durable and intangible, teaching the importance of deferred gratification.
Christensen was born to a working-class family in Salt Lake City. As a boy, he took to politics, closely following the Congressional Record, and in high school he made the all-state basketball team. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young, Christensen spent two years in South Korea as a missionary and received a Rhodes scholarship to study econometrics at Oxford. He went from Oxford to Harvard Business School before starting his career at Boston Consulting Group. In the 1980s, he founded an advanced-materials company called CPS Technologies, but his academic inclination led him back to Harvard as a business-school professor in 1992.
excerpted from National Review