A few years ago, a colleague at Harvard Business School visited Clayton Christensen's office to talk about leading a values-driven life. "He told me that he had decided against having religion in his life," Christensen recalls, explaining that his colleague didn't see the long-term benefits of sticking to principles every day, considering all the hard work involved. "He told me he thought it had 'a negative net present value.'"
This unusual application of an economic term delighted Christensen, a management professor known around HBS and the globe as both a brilliant business thinker and a deeply religious man. For more than a decade he has been a go-to consultant for several big organizations—his theories on disruptive innovation have steered huge strategy shifts at Intel Corp. and the Pentagon, for example. In 2011, Thinkers50 named him the world's most influential business thinker. At the same time, he has held major leadership positions in his church, and he's never taken a business meeting on a Sunday because his faith encourages its members to keep the Sabbath Day holy. He sees no dichotomy.
"You know, it's a travesty that somehow our society has gotten to a point where people have the view that science and academia are inconsistent with a spiritual life, and the belief that there we've been put here for a purpose," he says. "The reality is that the only reason you're interested in either of these things is that you're interested in finding the truth. We spend most of our waking hours in our professions, but if we can't allow success in our professions to benefit from truth that we have learned in the other parts of our lives, we just deprive ourselves of a very important input."
This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.