Top 100 Clayton Christensen Quotes
#1. Many of the factors that we think will cause motivation, such as fair pay and a good manager, won't make you love your job. Even if you eliminate what makes you dissatisfied, that doesn't make you motivated. It doesn't make your work rewarding. You just are less bothered by things.
Clayton Christensen
#2. When a technology, regardless of how different and difficult it is, sustains the trajectory of performance improvement, my research asserts that the leaders in the prior generation of technology are likely to end up on top of their industry at the end of the transition.
Clayton Christensen
#3. What the purpose of my life is about is I want to become the kind of person that God wants me to become, and through my study of the scriptures, I can articulate the kind of person that God would be happy if I become.
Clayton Christensen
#4. Focus is scary - until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development.
Clayton Christensen
#5. Having a loving relationship with our spouse or with our children is what leads to the long-term happiness we all seek.
Clayton Christensen
#6. In the scriptures, we are told you can't really understand happiness unless you understand sadness. You don't know pleasure if you don't know pain. It's part of life. So can you learn something from somebody who has gone from success to success to success? I don't think so.
Clayton Christensen
#7. Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.
Clayton Christensen
#8. Empowering innovations transform something that is complicated and expensive into something that is so much more simple and affordable that a much larger population can enjoy it.
Clayton Christensen
#9. Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.
Clayton Christensen
#10. In a large successful company where your power base as CEO isn't all that secure, it's hard for a CEO to pursue a truly disruptive strategy.
Clayton Christensen
#11. The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations.
Clayton Christensen
#12. The key is not to figure out what the best people are doing and try to emulate it - rather, figure out what causes people and companies to be successful.
Clayton Christensen
#13. Whenever we have thanked these men and women for what they have done for us, without exception they have expressed gratitude for having the chance to help - because they grew as they served.
Clayton Christensen
#14. Christine and I haven't raised our children. A whole community of selfless Christians has contributed to helping them become faithful, competent adults.
Clayton Christensen
#15. In an environment where you've got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you'll be successful is actually much higher.
Clayton Christensen
#17. The first two lessons, which we learned early in our efforts to be good member missionaries, have made sharing the Gospel much easier: We simply can't predict who will or won't be interested in the Gospel, and building a friendship is not a prerequisite to inviting people to learn about the Gospel.
Clayton Christensen
#18. The only useful information about the market will be what I create through expeditions into the market, through testing and probing, trial and error, by selling real products to real people who pay real money.
Clayton Christensen
#19. Disruption is continuously afoot in every industry, but especially in autos. It is how Toyota, Nissan and Honda bloodied Detroit: They did not start their attack with Lexus, Infiniti and Acura, but with low-end subcompact models branded Corona, Datsun and CVCC.
Clayton Christensen
#20. Every time you take someone figuratively by the hand and introduce him or her to Jesus Christ, you will feel how deeply our Savior loves you and loves the person whose hand is in yours.
Clayton Christensen
#21. The path I am trying so hard to follow is in fact the one that God my Father and His Son Jesus Christ want me to pursue. It has brought me deep happiness.
Clayton Christensen
#22. While I wouldn't say that most entrepreneurs find it easy to get funding, there are certainly more people out there funding technology and healthcare companies than in other areas.
Clayton Christensen
#23. Each of our children during their high school years went to 'early morning seminary' - scripture study classes that met in the home of a church member every school day morning from 6:30 until 7:15.
Clayton Christensen
#24. Growth makes management easier. In particular, it makes making labor concessions seem easy. It's when growth stops because you're being disrupted that managing becomes really, really hard, and as a result, most disrupted companies simply disappear.
Clayton Christensen
#25. When product performance outstrips the ability of customers to use that performance in an industry, the competitive game changes. Under those circumstances you have to decouple components businesses from assembly businesses.
Clayton Christensen
#26. Finding a 'sacrificial lamb' on whom to tag blame for complicated problems is an important instrument in the toolkit of politicians, because it deflects blame for the nation's economic woes away from their own regulatory lapses, economic mismanagement and coddling to labor unions.
Clayton Christensen
#27. For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core.
Clayton Christensen
#28. In 15 years from now half of US universities may be in bankruptcy ... in the end I'm excited to see that happen. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn't mind.
Clayton Christensen
#29. A sustaining innovation makes better products that you can sell for better profits to your best customers.
Clayton Christensen
#30. In organizations, once you articulate how success will be measured, everybody tries to game the system so that they are measured in the best possible way.
Clayton Christensen
#31. People under-invest in family because it doesn't pay off until the long term.
Clayton Christensen
#32. Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at.
Clayton Christensen
#33. Investing in our people is going to be costly and scarce - we need to start doing that!
Clayton Christensen
#34. Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven't asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question - you have to want to know - in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.
Clayton Christensen
#35. The answer is the disruptive innovator, an outsider, who creates a product or service for the non-existing consumer in a non-existing market for almost no profit.
Clayton Christensen
#36. I have been blessed to see visions of eternity; and events in my future that have been important for me to foresee, have been revealed to me.
Clayton Christensen
#37. If we are to develop profound theory to solve the intractable problems in our societally-critical domains ... we must learn to crawl into the life of what makes people tick.
Clayton Christensen
#38. If you develop a product that gets what the customer is trying to get done, you don't have to advertise; people will just pull it into their lives.
Clayton Christensen
#39. Ultimately, when you come up with a classification scheme that is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, then the theory can become what Kuhn called a paradigm.
Clayton Christensen
#40. I have healed the sick by the power of the God. I have spoken with the gift of tongues.
Clayton Christensen
#42. There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.
Clayton Christensen
#44. Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That's not management; that's dealmaking.
Clayton Christensen
#46. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it's practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.
Clayton Christensen
#47. It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.
Clayton Christensen
#48. Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something, and it doesn't work, and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet ... Ultimately, you become commercially successful.
Clayton Christensen
#49. Understanding motivation is one of the most important things we can do in our lives, because it has such a bearing on why we do the things we do and whether we enjoy them or not.
Clayton Christensen
#50. We need to have an understanding of what causes what to happen in the world, and why.
Clayton Christensen
#51. I haven't met too many people that don't intend to have a fulfilling life. High-achievers, however, end up allocating their resources in a way that seriously undermines their intended strategy.
Clayton Christensen
#52. If the technology is disruptive, on the other hand, the odds are that at the end of the transition, the leaders will have been toppled and new companies will be on top.
Clayton Christensen
#54. Diabetes is a great example whereby, giving the patient the tools, you can manage yourself very well.
Clayton Christensen
#55. People don't actually want to think about their own health and don't take action until they are sick. Yet employers are very motivated to get their employees healthy, since they bear most of the burden of their health care costs.
Clayton Christensen
#56. Its actually really important that you succeed at what youre succeeding at, but that isnt going to be the measure of your life.
Clayton Christensen
#57. There's usually some process by which a potentially great idea gets prostituted into something lacklustre, or by which the wrong idea gets put forward.
Clayton Christensen
#58. Capitalism has taught us that markets are always more efficient than hierarchical managerial coordination. But in a situation where those three conditions aren't met, I can't outsource or partner with you because markets don't function in the absence of sufficient information.
Clayton Christensen
#59. But actually theory is very practical. Gravity is a theory, for example. It allows you to predict that if you step off a cliff you will fall; you don't have to collect data on that.
Clayton Christensen
#60. I have continued systematically to study the Book of Mormon and Bible to understand even more deeply what God expects of me and my family while on this earth.
Clayton Christensen
#61. Lets take the best of our ideas from Global Drucker Forum, and the best of our language, and then focus and clarify.
Clayton Christensen
#62. Doing deals doesn't yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.
Clayton Christensen
#63. Businesses that distribute information and news are in the business of training and teaching people.
Clayton Christensen
#64. A lot has been written about the Internet bust. From my point of view, it's quite clear the Internet isn't a category; the Internet is a technological infrastructure that can be deployed to facilitate a disruptive business model or a sustaining business model.
Clayton Christensen
#65. The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.
Clayton Christensen
#66. If you make that decision, that you'll always follow that rule, then your commitment to do it sinks into your heart, and when you realize the benefits of having integrity time after time, it really changes your heart, not just your head.
Clayton Christensen
#67. Most marketers think there's a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don't exist.
Clayton Christensen
#68. The marginal cost of doing something 'just this once' always seems to be negligible, but the full cost will typically be much higher. Yet unconsciously, we will naturally employ the marginal-cost doctrine in our personal lives.
Clayton Christensen
#69. Management is getting people together to figure out how to transform inputs into outputs. In the process of figuring out the process of how people work together, you've got to figure out who's got what responsibilities, and how do they work together.
Clayton Christensen
#70. During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn't yet adequate to meet customer's needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution - because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way.
Clayton Christensen
#71. Efficiency innovations arise in industries that already exist. They provide existing goods and services at much lower costs. They are not empowering. Efficiency innovators become the low cost providers within an existing framework.
Clayton Christensen
#72. In most instances, biotechnology, though a radically different approach, is a sustaining technology: It's a dramatically improved way of targeting problems that we hadn't been able to solve with the conventional approach of mainstream pharmaceutical companies.
Clayton Christensen
#73. Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently, the world is awash in capital, but the innovations we need to advance aren't there.
Clayton Christensen
#74. The Republicans are wrong in thinking that the rich create jobs. In reality, many of the richest Americans have been investing in efficiency innovations rather than to create jobs. And the Democrats are wrong, because growth won't happen if they distribute the wealth of the wealthy to everyone else.
Clayton Christensen
#75. You can invest to create the new growth business while the core business is still growing, because new business units don't need to get big fast. But when the core business stops growing, investing to create new growth businesses becomes impossible.
Clayton Christensen
#77. The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.
Clayton Christensen
#78. I love my life as a missionary, keeping myself on the front lines. The image in my mind is that God, my general, stands at the door when I go out every morning; and, knowing what the war is like, day after day he gives me his most powerful weapon: his Spirit. For this I am grateful.
Clayton Christensen
#79. People who have the drive to achieve spend most of their time on what brings them the most tangible, immediate sense of success. Investments in our family only pay off in the very long term.
Clayton Christensen
#80. When an entrant competitor attacks the low end of any market, the rational reaction of the incumbent firms is to abandon rather than defend it - because the low end is the least profitable of their possible investments.
Clayton Christensen
#81. Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital - oceans of capital - that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation.
Clayton Christensen
#82. There is no evidence that success in business will make us happy people or allow us to have happy families.
Clayton Christensen
#84. When you're thinking about your next product or current product and wondering how to make it different so you don't have competition, understand the job the customer needs to get done.
Clayton Christensen
#85. I've concluded that getting the categories right is an absolutely crucial step to building useful management theory, and unfortunately too few writers do this. You've got to engage in serious scholarship, and then figure out how to write it in a way that lots of people can understand.
Clayton Christensen
#86. I talk to our kids now that they are grown up, and I ask them about the experiences that had growing up that really had a powerful influence on the way they view the purpose of life. The experiences that really shaped their values - my wife and I have no memory of those experiences!
Clayton Christensen
#87. What you need is a fundamental humility - the belief that you can learn from anyone.
Clayton Christensen
#88. When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.
Clayton Christensen
#90. Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.
Clayton Christensen
#91. 'Disruption' is, at its core, a really powerful idea. Everyone hijacks the idea to do whatever they want now. It's the same way people hijacked the word 'paradigm' to justify lame things they're trying to sell to mankind.
Clayton Christensen
#92. Only the general manager can mold the resources, processes, and values that affect innovation , into a coherent capability to develop and launch superior new products and services repeatedly.
Clayton Christensen
#94. The ability to share the Gospel isn't a 'gift' that has been given to only a few Latter-day Saints and denied to the rest.
Clayton Christensen
#95. How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?
Clayton Christensen
#96. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they'll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered while at school. If they don't figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life.
Clayton Christensen
#97. To focus capital and entrepreneurship into empowering innovation, we should change is the capital gains tax rate. We would be better served by a regressive tax rate, that would become progressively smaller the longer the investment is held.
Clayton Christensen
#98. We all have jobs in our lives that we must get done. We reach out and bring products into our lives to get these jobs done. Marketing is all about asking, 'What job is the customer trying to accomplish?'
Clayton Christensen
#99. India's prosperity is sectioned by geography, such as in Bangalore, where the information technology industry is prominent. Because they have a conduit out of India, competing in the world by the Internet, it's not regulated in corrupt ways, and it is very prosperous.
Clayton Christensen
#100. Breaking an old business model is always going to require leaders to follow their instinct. There will always be persuasive reasons not to take a risk. But if you only do what worked in the past, you will wake up one day and find that you've been passed by.
Clayton Christensen
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