Clayton Christensen

Christensen was already the most influential management thinker of his generation — The Innovator's Dilemma explained why great companies get killed from below — when he adopted the jobs lens to answer the question disruption theory couldn't: what should you build? He put jobs into print in The Innovator's Solution and spent the next decade retelling one milkshake study until the idea stuck.

Christensen was the rare academic whose ideas ran companies. The Innovator's Dilemma explained why great firms die politely — listening to their best customers straight into disruption — and made 'disruptive innovation' the most used (and misused) term in tech. Jobs to be Done was his answer to the question disruption theory raised but couldn't answer: what should you build instead? Between the two frameworks sits a complete worldview: markets are not demographics but circumstances, and companies fail by measuring the wrong unit of progress. He remained, by wide consensus, the most influential management thinker of his era until his death in 2020.