The Disruptive Voice

Many students of Clayton Christensen's will be familiar with the US Steel case that he wrote as a graduate student in the 1990s, one that is still used today in the BSSE curriculum at Harvard Business School. The case tells the story of the minimills' low-end disruption of US Steel, entering the market with rebar and then steadily moving up-market to bars & rods, then on to structural steel, and f...

We're delighted to begin Season 4 of The Disruptive Voice with Anna Marie Wagner , Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Ginkgo Bioworks . Hosted by Derek van Bever , Anna Marie discusses the transformative potential of bioengineering and the work her company is doing to help facilitate it. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar, Anna M...

In the early days of venture capital, investors played a dual role as financiers and innovators, partnering with their portfolio companies to design and develop their operations from the ground up. Nowadays most VC firms don't generate and pursue innovations but rather source and grow start-ups that already exist. For established businesses seeking to self-disrupt with autonomous units, these circ...

Michelle Weise is an expert in higher education and in the development of more innovative workforce and talent pipelines. A former Senior Research Fellow in Higher Education at The Christensen Institute , she joined us on The Disruptive Voice to reflect on her career over the last decade, which has concentrated on preparing working-age adults for the jobs of both today and tomorrow. Hosted by Kati...

Over a year ago, The Forum for Growth & Innovation team ventured to North Carolina to learn about the ways in which a group of innovators had spread the gospel of disruption to the senior leadership of Atrium Health .  Regular listeners of the podcast may remember when we interviewed Atrium's Ann-Somers Hogg on her experience of studying the theories of Disruptive Innovation and Jobs To Be Done as...

Online grocery shopping isn't ( really ) catching on. While there has been real growth in the number of Americans who shop for groceries online in 2020, even in the midst of a global pandemic, the vast majority of customers choose to shop in person. Why?  This week on The Disruptive Voice, we're delighted to bring you José Vicente Aguerrevere and Max Pedró , co-founders of Takeoff Technologies , f...

When was the last time you heard your best friend's voice? This question is at the heart of this week's episode of The Disruptive Voice. We're now seven months into a global pandemic that has torn and kept friends and families apart. In the midst of all this distance and distress, many are searching for ways to deeply and authentically connect with those they love. That's why we reached out to Ame...

Why are there no sales professors at the Harvard Business School or anywhere else, for that matter? Given that selling products and services is such a fundamental aspect of business, it may surprise you to learn that " most MBA programs offer no sales-related courses at all, and those that do offer only a single course in sales management. " Enter Bob Moesta , President & CEO of the Re-Wired Group...

This week, as the New York City public schools scramble to re-open  and students across the country settle into routines that are anything but routine , we checked in with Michael Horn to hear his views on the state of education amidst the pandemic. Michael is a widely published researcher, strategist, and innovator who co-founded The Clayton Christensen Institute and currently serves as Senior St...

Over the course of the twentieth century, the growth of the consulting industry was fueled by a series of sustaining innovations that strongly influenced the practice of management and corporate strategy. As a result, leading consulting firms today have well-defined value propositions and business models, offering premium, high cost services to a relatively small pool of clients, while simultaneou...

In The Capitalist's Dilemma , Clayton Christensen and Derek van Bever highlighted a persistent temptation for companies to increase profitability by driving down costs through "efficiency innovations." For many companies awash in capital, this increased profitability came at the expense of hundreds or thousands of jobs and often ignored the sources of long-term, sustainable growth: what Clay and D...

Here at The Disruptive Voice, we've applied the theory of Jobs To Be Done to healthcare, education, poverty, and religion, among many other topics. This week we're considering the reasons that people hire and fire the arts. As COVID-19 continues to shape our communities and lives, we're excited to bring you this timely conversation with Pope Ward , Chief Research Officer at the Advisory Board for...

On this week's episode of The Disruptive Voice, we're delighted to bring you a conversation with Erin Wetzel and Emily Snyder about their life-changing experiences working with Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School.  Emily, currently Chief of Staff at Magnolia , served as Clay's Administrative Director for five years before attending Columbia Business School. Erin joined Clay's office in...

As the coronavirus continues to reshape the world, we turned to Scott D. Anthony , Managing Director at Innosight , to discuss his friendship and collaboration with Clayton Christensen; innovating during big event disruptions; the important concept of dual transformation; the role of Jobs To Be Done in strategic innovation; and his forthcoming book , "Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity a...

This week on The Disruptive Voice we're delighted to bring you a timely conversation with Professor Luis Viceira and David Snider (MBA '13) on the state of the FinTech industry. Luis serves as the George E. Bates Professor in the Finance Unit and is also Senior Associate Dean for Executive Education at Harvard Business School, where he conducts research on long-term asset allocation, asset pricing...

When Nikhil Agarwal and Chris Abkarians were admitted to the Harvard Business School MBA Class of 2020, neither of them could have guessed that their efforts to negotiate on the price of their student loans would be transformed into a viable new venture. However, before they had even set foot on campus, they had saved themselves and around 700 of their peers an average of $15,000 each on their stu...

Do you remember having cable TV? Many of us do not . Over the last twenty years, the media landscape has been transformed amidst waves of disruption, technological innovation, and changing patterns of media consumption. Today on The Disruptive Voice, we bring you a timely conversation with Shilpa Bisaria , Senior Director of Growth Strategy and Operations at WarnerMedia , discussing how she has us...

This week on The Disruptive Voice, we're delighted to introduce you to Euvin Naidoo and Efosa Ojomo , who join us for a conversation about innovation, prosperity, and development in Africa. Originally from KwaDukuza, South Africa, Euvin is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, where he studies risk management, performance controls, governance, and agile execution. In doing so, he regularly...

Twenty years ago, Mark W. Johnson and Clayton Christensen co-founded Innosight , a consulting firm focused on helping organizations to design and create the future, rather than be disrupted by it. This week on The Disruptive Voice, we're pleased to welcome Mark for some reflections on his work and friendship with Clay; on a process of longer-term management called future-back thinking, which he an...

This week on The Disruptive Voice, we're delighted to introduce you to Professor Rory McDonald , the Thai-Hi T. Lee Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.  Before his untimely passing, Clayton Christensen named Rory as the Course Head of Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise and also charged him with leading and transforming BSSE to fit the needs of it...

In the midst of this global coronavirus crisis, we at The Forum for Growth & Innovation are reflecting on how we can lend our hands and hearts to meet the needs of those in our community. Now, more than ever, we are mourning the loss of our friend and colleague, Clayton Christensen, who would have turned 68 this coming Monday, April 6th. This month also marks the release of our 50th podcast episod...

This week on The Disruptive Voice, we are delighted to bring you a conversation, recorded in early March, with Thomas Arnett . Thomas is a Senior Research Fellow - Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute , where he researches disruption in K-12 education, considers the role of educational technology in blended learning teaching models, and contributes to thought leadership on legislation an...

In the US, many go bankrupt due to the extraordinary high costs in our healthcare system.  On an annual basis, we spend around $3.6 trillion – or 18% of GDP – on healthcare, but what do we get in exchange?  In this engaging episode, Dr. Mahek Shah discusses several topics at the heart of creating a more affordable and accessible healthcare industry: pricing prescription drugs, creating a better pa...

Here at Harvard Business School, we are mourning the recent passing of Professor Clayton Christensen . As many listeners will know, Clay died in late January following complications from leukemia. Our hearts go out to all who knew and were touched by him, and we feel that now, more than ever, we must press on, sharing his life's work. Therefore, we are heartened to bring you this conversation with...

In 2009, at a time when The Atlantic was a 152 year old publication known chiefly for its erudite monthly magazine, Bob Cohn joined as Editor of Atlantic Digital. A career journalist, he arrived at The Atlantic five years into a fifteen year wave of disruption that shuttered the doors of some 1,800 local newspapers across the United States . Under Bob's leadership, digital publishing thrived at Th...