Top 100 Clayton Christensen Quotes
#1. 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
#2. This is why I belong, and why I believe. I commend to all this same search for happiness and for the truth.
Clayton Christensen
#3. The best strategy is a balance between having a deliberate one, and a flexible, or emergent strategy.
Clayton Christensen
#4. 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
#5. People under-invest in family because it doesn't pay off until the long term.
Clayton Christensen
#6. 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
#7. A sustaining innovation makes better products that you can sell for better profits to your best customers.
Clayton Christensen
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core.
Clayton Christensen
#11. 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
#12. Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.
Clayton M Christensen
#13. Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.
Clayton Christensen
#14. Investing in our people is going to be costly and scarce - we need to start doing that!
Clayton Christensen
#15. We have found that companies need to speak a common language because some of the suggested ways to harness disruptive innovation are seemingly counterintuitive. If companies don't have that common language, it is hard for them to come to consensus on a counterintuitive course of action.
Clayton Christensen
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Children are ready to learn when they are ready to learn, not necessarily when their parents are ready to teach them.
Clayton Christensen
#20. 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
#21. Optimizing return on capital will generate less growth than optimizing return on education.
Clayton Christensen
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I have healed the sick by the power of the God. I have spoken with the gift of tongues.
Clayton Christensen
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Businesses want to think in terms of categories. Consumers want us to think in terms of their needs.
Clayton Christensen
#31. We decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others ... Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself - and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too.
Clayton Christensen
#32. 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
#33. The transformation at the corporate level was achieved by selling off business units in old markets and by creating new business units to pursue the new opportunities. But the individual business units themselves within those transformed corporations were almost inert to change.
Clayton Christensen
#34. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.
Clayton Christensen
#36. There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.
Clayton Christensen
#38. For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.
Clayton M Christensen
#39. The principles of disruptive innovation are indeed intended to be guidelines to assist managers both in introducing disruptive innovations as well as identifying disruptive developments in their market.
Clayton Christensen
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. The mistake that makes launching a venture expensive is when you try to make a disruptive technology so good that it can compete on a quality basis with an established product.
Clayton Christensen
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. If you need a machine and don't buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don't have it.
Clayton Christensen
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.
Clayton M Christensen
#57. Inviting others to help us with our work in the Church helps them feel needed and helps them feel the Spirit. When these feelings come, many people often then realize that something has been missing from their lives.
Clayton Christensen
#58. People in private equity complain that they have so much capital and so few places to invest. But you have lots of entrepreneurs trying to raise money at the low end and find that they can't get funding because of this mismatch. I think that there is an opportunity there.
Clayton Christensen
#59. There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.
Clayton M Christensen
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. A disruptive innovation is a technologically simple innovation in the form of a product, service, or business model that takes root in a tier of the market that is unattractive to the established leaders in an industry.
Clayton Christensen
#65. 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
#66. Because of the disruption phenomenon - technological progress outstripping the ability of customers to utilize it - the general tendency is for the money to migrate toward the subsystems.
Clayton Christensen
#67. Having a loving relationship with our spouse or with our children is what leads to the long-term happiness we all seek.
Clayton Christensen
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations.
Clayton M Christensen
#73. People have an idol they want to be like and try to follow what the idols did. But when you do, you find out you're not very successful and you're not very happy. You try to copy these models, and it doesn't yield successful results.
Clayton Christensen
#74. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. For online universities, like Liverpool and the University of Phoenix, if prices drop by 60%, they still make money. But for the vast majority of traditional universities, if the prices fall by 10%, they are bankrupt; they have no wriggle room.
Clayton Christensen
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me.
Clayton Christensen
#90. The world is a nested space, and so we have our brain as a person, and people are members of teams, and teams are part of business units, and business units are parts of corporations, and corporations are part of industries, which are part of economies.
Clayton Christensen
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.
Clayton M Christensen
#96. Colleges would compete by adding professors, enhancing programmes or building nicer facilities. So they competed by making institutions better.
Clayton M Christensen
#97. The way I ought to measure my life is in terms of the others I helped to become better and happier people. That's the biggest thing to think about if you're not happy.
Clayton Christensen
#99. 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
#100. 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
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