Clayton Christensen

But what Apple has done very, very consistently, whether it was Jobs, Cook, or now Ternas has been, taking categories that are new and creating new ones at the highest end of the price points.

Now, this is really important, is that Clay Christensen, the author of The Innovator's Dilemma, has noted that disruption comes from below at lower prices.

And Apple has proven the opposite, that they have not been disrupted because they come in at higher price points.

Remember, the original iPhone was much more expensive than a regular flip phone that you could get.

Okay, I can s- sorta see what you mean.

We'll give some details, but I'd like to start with the Clayton Christensen milkshake story.

I don't know that there's a perfect overlap.

M- I don't remember if you and I have talked about this.

[laughs]

Um, no, the...

Clayton Christensen, longtime professor at, uh, at Harvard Business School.

Um, I had a chance to meet him one time, and he wrote many books.

And I call them the situations that people find themselves in.

That switch, that threshold is what Clayton Christensen was talking about in his book, in his article, Marketing Malpractice, where he said, the customer is no longer the unit of analysis.

He said, the job is the unit of analysis.

And that... kind of relates to that moment of switching as well.

There's a book that... was done by the guy who, or written by the guy who wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, which is his more well-known book, but...

I know you're talking about Clayton Christensen.

Yes, yes, yes.

So, you know, live Googling, because my brain is, you know, half working.

But Clayton Christensen wrote a book called How Will You Measure Your Life? And it's a collection of his essays about, like, meaning personal meaning and like you know priorities and you know that that to me is super important stuff uh there's another one um called the top five regrets of the dying that i always send people to literally one of the most life-changing books i ever had as far as like remembering that at the end of your life nobody says oh i wish i'd worked harder and i wish i had uh you know like spent more time with my work relationships instead of my family like again silly it sounds silly but man you read those stories i was i was crying multiple points in that book being thinking about And then tactically from an entrepreneurial perspective, there's a book called Buy Then Build that is fantastic if you want to get into acquisitions at any level, whether you're not an entrepreneur and you want to buy your first business or you're an entrepreneur who's looking to acquire to grow.

Super helpful as far as working through the mechanics of what finding a deal looks like, how the math works out on buying and funding the business.

That's Walker

And I also started to pay attention to education entrepreneurs who were sort of thinking more about the social side of opportunity.

I took a very expensive detour through law school, determined I did not want to be a lawyer, and found by both luck and my network a role at the Clayton Christensen Institute in 2013.

Now, this was a really interesting opportunity to me because, first of all, Clay and his colleague Michael Horn, who created the Institute, were bringing a lot of rigor to the idea of innovation in education.

It wasn't just like try something new, treat kids as guinea pigs, and fingers crossed something good comes out the other side.

So it takes a while.

And I think one of the things that's going to happen is, and this is an example of innovator's dilemma, right, in Clay Christensen's terms.

Legacy organizations, I think, are going to struggle to accommodate and adapt and use these things, whereas new organizations are going to have a huge advantage.

Yes.