Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. Luckily, [he and his wife] had bought two wrecks of houses and fixed them up themselves, so there had always been Sheetrocking or plastering or painting to do with the kids, but he knew that most of his students would consider this a waste of time. Wanting their children to spend their extracurricular hours in the most profitable way, they would pay for lessons and smart, enriching activities, and they would outsource the low-end, dumb tasks like moving the lawn and mending clothes, and the children would grow up without knowing how to solve practical problems by themselves, or do something they didn’t enjoy or thought they weren’t going to be good at.
“When Giants Fail: What business has learned from Clayton Christensen” by Larissa MacFarquhar (The New Yorker, May 14, 2012)
