Scott D. Anthony

You need this duality, almost a paradox in your mind where you are simultaneously thinking about long-term future and present reality, recognizing if you don't care and deliver for today, you don't earn the right to do tomorrow.

But if you don't have a vision, a direction to which you're trying to go to for tomorrow, the efforts that you have in today are going to be misguided or even counterproductive.

And the thing that I generally counsel leaders to do is make sure that you just stop and you apply different timeframes and mental models as you're looking at different things that you are trying to decide around.

Yeah, for sure.

So it started in September 2000.

I was a second year student at the Harvard Business School, and I signed up for this class called Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise.

It was a new class, so there were no reviews of the class.

I just thought the description sounded interesting.

The first day of the class, Clay Christensen ambles into the room.

He was six foot, eight inches tall, so quite a figure.

And did something that was really quite anachronistic, which was he took out acetates, like actual slides, and put them onto a projector and started lecturing.

And if you know anything about the Harvard Business School, that's really unusual.

It is entirely the case-based method.

That's just the way that classes start.

But Clay was saying from the beginning, this is going to be a different class.

Yes, we're going to do lots of cases.

We're going to explore lots of territories.

But I want to ground it in models, frameworks, and ways of thinking so that you leave it with new lenses to look at the world.

And from that minute, I was captivated just by the approach.

Then as I learned about some of his thinking, well, we can explore that in more depth.