Clayton Christensen: “Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved.”

From a New York Times obit, by Glenn Rifkin, on “Clayton Christensen, Guru of Disruptive Innovation”:

Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard professor whose groundbreaking 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” outlined his theories about the impact of what he called “disruptive innovation” on leading companies and catapulted him to superstar status as a management guru, died on Thursday in a Boston hospital. He was 67. . . .

A Rhodes scholar who had studied econometrics at Oxford University and a graduate of the Harvard Business School, Professor Christensen joined the school’s faculty in 1992. A former basketball star (he stood 6-foot-8) as well as an affable academic, he focused as much on a life well lived as he did on his management theories. . . .

When he learned he had cancer, Professor Christensen decided to write about how he had reconsidered his impact on the business world. In 2012 he published “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” a book, written with two co-authors, that was based on an article of the same title that had appeared in Harvard Business Review. In it, he recast his management theories as a formula for measuring how best to live one’s life. . . .

Ultimately, the realization that his ideas had generated enormous revenue for companies that used his research left him dissatisfied. “I know I’ve had substantial impact,” he wrote. “But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is on me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.

“Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved,” he continued; “worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.”