Top 75 Clayton M Christensen Quotes
#2. As a general rule, if you have a product that doesn't get the job done that a customer is needing to get done, then often you have to offer it for zero. Because if you ask for money for it - because if it doesn't do the job well, they won't pay for it.
Clayton M Christensen
#3. There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations.
Clayton M Christensen
#4. My wife comes most of the times I teach and stands on the front row to help me. She's been wonderfully supportive.
Clayton M Christensen
#5. There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.
Clayton M Christensen
#6. The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.
Clayton M Christensen
#7. There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.
Clayton M Christensen
#8. Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.
Clayton M Christensen
#9. The dumb-manager theory of business problems just didn't hold water for me. There had to be a deeper reason why smart people would make decisions that lead to failure.
Clayton M Christensen
#10. The concept of disruption is about competitive response; it is not a theory of growth. It's adjacent to growth. But it's not about growth.
Clayton M Christensen
#12. Colleges would compete by adding professors, enhancing programmes or building nicer facilities. So they competed by making institutions better.
Clayton M Christensen
#13. Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.
Clayton M Christensen
#16. If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.
Clayton M Christensen
#17. 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.
Clayton M Christensen
#18. In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge.
Clayton M Christensen
#19. From my first year on the faculty, there was always so much more I wanted to impart to the students. I decided that, rather than waste the last day of class summarizing the semester, I'd spend my time talking about what I'd learned in life that was useful.
Clayton M Christensen
#20. I felt that I could look back on my life and think about lots of folks that I helped become better folks. And I've tried to be as good a man as I could be.
Clayton M Christensen
#21. I wouldn't say there isn't a direct path to a successful career. There are people who knew exactly what they wanted to do from a very young age, weren't going to be diverted, and then they just went out and achieved it.
Clayton M Christensen
#22. The past is a good predictor of the future only when conditions in the future resemble conditions in the past. And what works for a firm in one context might not work for another firm in a different context.
Clayton M Christensen
#23. The fact that hospitals and physicians' practices are not job-focused, but instead aspire to do anything for anybody, has caused them not to be integrated correctly. In their current configuration, they cannot be consumer-driven.
Clayton M Christensen
#24. Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.
Clayton M Christensen
#25. Probably the most daunting challenge in delivering growth is that if you fail once to deliver it, the odds that you ever will be able to deliver in the future are very low.
Clayton M Christensen
#26. If present rates of improvement continue, however, we would expect the cruising range of electric cars, for example, to intersect with the average range demanded in the mainstream market by 2015, and electric vechicle acceleration to intersect with mainstream demands by 2020.
Clayton M Christensen
#27. Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you'll never become that person.
Clayton M Christensen
#28. Study after study, however, concludes that about 90 percent of all publicly traded companies have proved themselves unable to sustain for more than a few years a growth trajectory that creates above-average shareholder returns.
Clayton M Christensen
#29. It's easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.
Clayton M Christensen
#30. For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.
Clayton M Christensen
#31. One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year.
Clayton M Christensen
#32. Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don't even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.
Clayton M Christensen
#33. To become the kind of person you want to become, you've got to have discipline. It's easier to keep to your standards 100 percent of the time versus 98 percent of the time.
Clayton M Christensen
#34. By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption.
Clayton M Christensen
#36. I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey.
Clayton M Christensen
#37. When a company identifies how to integrate the processes needed to give the consumer a sense of job completion, it can blow away the competition. A product is easy to copy, but experiences are very hard to replicate.
Clayton M Christensen
#38. There are a lot of companies - not just Sony and Kodak - that have spent a lot of money trying to make the quality of the digital images comparable with film. But when you're sending these things over the Internet, they don't have to be high quality.
Clayton M Christensen
#39. As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.
Clayton M Christensen
#40. When commercializing disruptive technologies, they found or developed new markets that valued the attributes of the disruptive products, rather than search for a technological breakthrough so that the disruptive product could compete as a sustaining technology in mainstream markets.
Clayton M Christensen
#41. In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder.
Clayton M Christensen
#42. As a general rule, when a new industry takes root, and the first products emerge in a wave, almost always the architecture of the product will be proprietary and interdependent in character.
Clayton M Christensen
#43. I wrote my first piece about the disruption of the Harvard Business School in 1999. Because you could see this coming. I haven't yet done the one about the disruption of the Stanford Business School.
Clayton M Christensen
#44. In a healthy economy, empowering, sustaining and efficiency innovations operate in balance. A healthy economy creates and sustains more jobs before squeezing out inefficiencies.
Clayton M Christensen
#45. Most people have never thought through how they're going to allocate their time. You need to make a decision in advance.
Clayton M Christensen
#46. Relative to the taxi industry, Uber is a sustaining innovation; that is, it makes customers' lives better. Uber targeted mainstream markets with a better service for existing customers, and it succeeded in serving them better than the incumbents.
Clayton M Christensen
#47. Almost always, great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before.
Clayton M Christensen
#48. the breakthrough researcher first discovers the fundamental causal mechanism behind the phenomena of success. This allows those who are looking for "an answer" to get beyond the wings-and-feathers mind-set of copying the attributes of successful companies.
Clayton M Christensen
#49. Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.
Clayton M Christensen
#50. One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend.
Clayton M Christensen
#51. Remember that it is changes in the slope of the platform, not the level of the platform, that create shareholder value at an above-average rate.
Clayton M Christensen
#52. To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well.
Clayton M Christensen
#53. The whole enterprise of teaching managers is steeped in the ethic of data-driven analytical support. The problem is, the data is only available about the past. So the way we've taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when it's too late.
Clayton M Christensen
#54. Things happen to us in unpredictable ways, but the effect that that has on the kind of people who we become actually is not only open to chance - we can influence it in pretty profound ways.
Clayton M Christensen
#55. School is one of the things that children might hire to do the job. But the job is that children need to feel successful - every
Clayton M Christensen
#56. Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.
Clayton M Christensen
#57. They are always motivated to go up-market, and almost never motivated to defend the new or low-end markets that the disruptors find attractive. We call this phenomenon asymmetric motivation. It is the core of the innovator's dilemma, and the beginning of the innovator's solution.
Clayton M Christensen
#58. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of just this once.
Clayton M Christensen
#59. The only way all people can have the opportunity to choose or reject the gospel of Jesus Christ is for us, without judgment, to invite them to follow the Savior.
Clayton M Christensen
#60. When people encounter a significant threat, a response called "threat rigidity" sets in. The instinct of threat rigidity is to cease being flexible and to become "command and control" oriented - to focus everything on countering the threat in order to survive.
Clayton M Christensen
#61. Every city and town in America would be bankrupt if they kept their books the way private-sector companies keep their books - because of the obligation cities and towns have taken upon themselves to provide health care for their retirees.
Clayton M Christensen
#62. In our personal lives, we have a lot of businesses going on. I have a profession, I'm a father, a spouse, a good member of my community. How much of my time and energy can I allocate to each of those things? What I allocate becomes the strategy I have for my family, and everything else.
Clayton M Christensen
#63. I'd been raised Mormon, but there comes a time where you are not following what you've been taught, but discovering for yourself if it's true.
Clayton M Christensen
#64. We are awash in content that needs to be taught, yet the vast majority of colleges give a large portion of their faculties' salaries to fund research.
Clayton M Christensen
#66. 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.
Clayton M Christensen
#67. Managers may think they control the flow of resources in their firms, in the end it is really customers and investors who dictate how money will be spent because companies with investment patterns that don't satisfy their customers and investors don't survive.
Clayton M Christensen
#68. The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. - Steve Jobs
Clayton M Christensen
#69. In the Mormon Church, we believe we can be married for all eternity, not till death do you part. As Mom was getting older, she was excited, truly excited, that within a few years she'd be with Dad again.
Clayton M Christensen
#70. We will get growth and affordability in health care not by replicating the expertise of today's physicians in the form of new physicians. We will get it by embodying their expertise in devices and equipment, so expertise becomes widely available, more affordable, and much easier to obtain. This
Clayton M Christensen
#71. American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.
Clayton M Christensen
#72. In fact, how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.
Clayton M Christensen
#73. An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.
Clayton M Christensen
#74. you perfect results. What I can promise you is that you won't get it right if you don't commit to keep trying.
Clayton M Christensen
#75. In the universities, we teach you what we decide you need to know. And the employers find out when they hire people that students didn't learn what we needed them to learn. Online learning offerings, like the University of Phoenix, have relationships with employers and teach what you need to know.
Clayton M Christensen
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