The Economist:

You have not had an easy time of it over the last few years
No. I had a horrible heart attack and still have symptoms of that sometimes. Then cancer, which is in remission. But the stroke is the hardest thing because I just lost my ability to speak and to write. So I have had to relearn that literally one word at a time, and sometimes I use the wrong word or can’t find words. But overall I feel very blessed

It is incredibly brave to start lecturing again
My wife comes most of the times I teach and stands on the front row to help me. She’s been wonderfully supportive

In your lecture you suggested that firms are too beholden to data. How does that view fit with the age of big data?
It is truly scary to me. By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body. For example, there is a drug that is marketed by Elan BioNeurology called TYSABRI. It was developed for MS [multiple sclerosis]. It turns out that of the people who have MS a proportion respond magnificently to TYSABRI. And others don’t. So what do you conclude from this? Is it just a mediocre drug? No. It is that there is one disease but it manifests itself in different ways. How does big data figure out what is the core of what is going on?

You have written much about how technology will disrupt higher education
Two thing are salient. Firstly, the technology per se is not disruptive or sustaining. Rather it is the way it is deployed in the market. So if all that Harvard did was provide MOOCs to everyone so they could employ the technology in existing business models, it wouldn’t change much. But where it would make huge difference is on the delivery of education amongst a population that can’t come to Harvard Business School. And those are people who are working, or who have kids, and they can’t drop it all to get a traditional education. So firms have started corporate universities, and rather than saying you need to take this course for a semester and you have to learn what we say you need to know, corporate universities call Harvard up and say: “We need to teach strategy in a week. It needs to be customised to the, say, chicken industry. And it needs to start on this day and finish on this day.” And that’s a very different delivery of content. So MOOCs will be important when we are using that to replace learning from a teacher to learning on the job. But these will be a one to one replacement of a real teacher.

Much more on Clay Christensen, here.

Tap or click on the photo to view a larger, panoramic image. A beautiful, warm day to bale hay.

One does not often see traditional hay bales. Today’s approach is generally “round bales” or large, “square bales“.