Disruptive Strategy with Clayton Christensen

Course Description
In Disruptive Strategy leaders learn world-renowned Harvard Business School Professor
Clay Christensens core frameworks around disruption, innovation, growth, and strategy
through real-world case studies and interactive online learning. We expect participants to
bring real questions to the course and finish with new insights that they can apply to the
competitive challenges and opportunities facing them and their organizations. Participants
can expect to:

Become fluent in disruption theory and gain confidence in articulating complex

viewpoints
Apply strategic frameworks to assess new opportunities and potential threats
Acquire techniques for executive-level strategy formulation and team management
Discover the next big idea by learning from other participants on HBXs social course
platform

Course Delivery
Disruptive Strategy is delivered via HBX, a cutting-edge, interactive online learning platform
built from the ground up by Harvard Business School. Clayton Christensen has authored
the course and teaches the concepts in short, high-impact segments, so it fits into a busy
schedule. Participants can expect to spend approximately 5-6 hours per week on the
course, split between self-study on the course platform and group work with others in the
program.
A typical module has three parts to it:

Learn the concepts in short, high-impact videos from Clay and through interactive
teaching elements on the HBX platform.
Practice the concept through Harvard Business School-style case studies, which includes
interviews with top business leaders and invites participants to step into the shoes of a
CEO at a critical decision point. At the end of each case study, Clay analyzes what
happened, discusses how the concept applied to their situation, and emphasizes key
takeaways.
Apply the concepts to the challenges and opportunities ahead of the participants own
company through guided individual reflections, group discussions, and peer learning
facilitated through the HBX platform.

Syllabus & Module Descriptions

WEEK 1:
Introduction: Lenses on the World
Module overview: Clay teaches leaders to use his foundational frameworks like a set of
lenses to see challenges in new ways. The concepts will help leaders change the way they
frame problems, so they can build a common language and come to new solutions together.

As the application for this module, leaders will be guided to articulate individual strategic
questions they face in their own roles and organizations. Throughout the rest of the course,
they will be reminded of their question and guided to develop new insights and answers as
they look through additional lenses.

Module 1: Aligning with Innovation and Disruption

Module overview: Clay teaches about the three types of innovation (sustaining innovation,
low-end disruptive innovation, and new-market disruptive innovation) and how they
emerge. Leaders will learn how an industry can get blindsided by disruption, and how to
take advantage of it themselves to create new growth opportunities.

WEEK 2:

Module 2: Discovering Customer Jobs to be Done

Module overview: Clay teaches leaders how to distinguish between the attributes (such as
age, gender, income level, education level) which correlate with a customers decision to
buy a product and the factors which actually cause a customer to buy a product. A job is a
problem a person is trying to solve; customers dont really buy products, they hire them to
get a job done. By focusing intensely on serving jobs, companies can differentiate
themselves, achieve better margins, and avoid disruption.

WEEK 3:

Module 3: Organizing for Innovation

Module overview: Clay teaches that every company has resources, processes, and profit
formulas which make them capable of excelling at certain tasks, but incapable of executing
on other tasks. Leaders come to understand what their current organizations can and
cannot do. Beyond diagnosis, Clay teaches leaders how they must organize themselves and
their teams in order to take advantage of new opportunities and disruptions in the market.

GROUP PROJECT

WEEK 4:
Module 4: Maintaining a Disruptive Scope
Module overview: Clay teaches that even the best strategies are only temporarily successful.
As industries evolve, they modularize and the distribution of profits changes. To remain
successful, organizations must reposition on the new area of profitabilitythe performance
defining components and services. This module combines several of the theories of
Disruptive Strategy to help leaders build the intuition to move where the profitability will
be, instead of where it currently is. Clay challenges leaders to think critically about what the
appropriate scope of their organization should be in the future.

WEEK 5:

Module 5: Managing the Strategy Development Process

Module overview: Clay teaches that the process of formulating a strategy is sometimes more
important than the actual substance of the strategy. A common pitfall among both
incumbents and entrants is that they fail to deploy the right strategy development process
at the right time. In this module, leaders are empowered to know when they should be
disciplined in following a deliberate strategy or when they should be open to a more
emergent strategy. Clay will help leaders to identify factors that may hinder successful
strategy development.

FINAL PAPER

Faculty Author
Clayton M. Christensen
Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Clayton Christensen is regarded as one of the world's top experts on disruption, innovation, and growth
strategy and his ideas have been widely used in industries and organizations throughout the world. In a
poll of thousands of executives, consultants and business school professors, Clay has twice been named
the world's most influential business thinker.
Clay is the author of several New York Times bestsellers, including the seminal Innovator's Dilemma,
which lays out his theory of disruption, and How Will You Measure Your Life?, which examines how we
can achieve happiness in our personal lives.
Clay is an award-winning teacher at Harvard Business School and the creator of one of the most popular
elective courses in the MBA curriculum. HBX represents an exciting opportunity for Clay to reach many
more business leaders around the world, so that they can apply his transformational ideas to improve their
organizations.