Measuring profitability, measuring your life



Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen argues that excessive focus on measures of profitability based on balance-sheet ratios does not benefit the capitalist system as a whole. Professor Christensen spoke after accepting the 52nd annual McKinsey Award.

About the McKinsey Awards

Since 1959, McKinsey & Company and Harvard Business Review (HBR) have presented annual awards—selected by an independent panel of business leaders and academics—recognizing the best articles published in the magazine. Past recipients include influential management thinkers such as Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel, Ted Levitt, Henry Mintzberg, Michael Porter, and C. K. Prahalad.

This year, the panel awarded first place to Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Christensen for his article “How will you measure your life?” from the July–August 2010 issue of HBR. Christensen, the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at HBS, accepted the McKinsey Award (his fourth) on October 26 at a reception in San Francisco.

The judges also recognized two second-place articles: “The age of customer capitalism,” by Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto; and “Stop the innovation wars,” coauthored by Vijay Govindarajan, professor of international business at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Chris Trimble, adjunct associate professor of business administration at Tuck.

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