Clayton Christensen Quotes

I was lucky enough to build on the work of a number of people who had already run laps around this theory-building track. The original classification scheme, years ago, distinguished radical from incremental change. The theory said that established firms managed incremental change well, but would be expected to founder when their industry encountered a radical change.

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.

How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?

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.

This is why I belong, and why I believe. I commend to all this same search for happiness and for the truth.

How could Digital's collapse be so precipitous? It's because, in many ways, financial performance data is misleading. As you move up to the top of the market, you're getting rid of the less profitable products at the low end and adding business with more attractive margins at the high end. The rate of unit volume growth might be tapering off as you pursue these smaller markets, but your margins actually look better. So Wall Street rewards your stock price until you hit the ceiling.

If you want to make better theory, you've got to use the best that's available and look through the lens of another discipline to see if you can uncover more anomalies. By looking at the phenomena of failure from the perspective of sales, marketing, finance, general management, and the equity markets, I was able to see things that Rebecca [Henderson] hadn't.

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.

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.

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.

The process of writing 'The Innovator's Dilemma' entailed the developing a new theory. My colleagues, students and I have been improving that theory, and adding others to it, since that time.

The best strategy is a balance between having a deliberate one, and a flexible, or emergent strategy.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.

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.

Christine and I haven't raised our children. A whole community of selfless Christians has contributed to helping them become faithful, competent adults.

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.

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.

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.

It is a company's customers who effectively control what it can and cannot do.

The basic idea that marketing is wrong at its core is one of the main reasons why innovation seems blocked and unpredictable.

I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become. We can articulate the culture that we would want to exist in our family, and you can then, as the rest of life happens to you, you can utilize those things to help you become the kind of person you want to be.

I'm an optimistic person.

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.

If you understand cause and effect, it brings about a set of insights that leads you to a very different place. The knowledge will persuade you that the market isn't organized by customer category or by product category. If you understand the job that consumers need to complete, you can articulate all of the experiences in that job.

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.

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.

I don't feel that this concept of disruptive technology is the solution for everybody. But I think it's very important for innovators to understand what we've learned about established companies' motivation to target obvious profitable markets - and about their inability to find emerging ones. The evidence is just overwhelming.

Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.

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.

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.

Doing deals doesn't yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

I have healed the sick by the power of the God. I have spoken with the gift of tongues.

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.

A sustaining innovation makes better products that you can sell for better profits to your best customers.

Children are ready to learn when they are ready to learn, not necessarily when their parents are ready to teach them.

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.

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.

Investing in our people is going to be costly and scarce - we need to start doing that!

Optimizing return on capital will generate less growth than optimizing return on education.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.

Businesses that distribute information and news are in the business of training and teaching people.

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.

Managers are already voracious consumers of theory. Every time they make a decision or take action, it's based on some theory that leads them to believe that action will lead to the right result. The problem is, most managers aren't aware of the theories they're using, and they often use the wrong theories for the situation.

For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core.

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.

A major driver of the cost of healthcare in the United States is a compromise that was reached with the American Medical Association in the 1960s when Medicare was first established.

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.

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.

The important thing is that over time, scientific progress transforms things that used to have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode down to the pattern-recognition space; and from pattern recognition into the rules-based mode. This is the mechanism by which less-trained people are enabled to do more sophisticated things. This is always the way disruption happens. It enables a larger population of less-experienced people to do more sophisticated things.

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.

Steve Jobs and Apple taught us that profit is not the ultimate goal, but rather a consequence of something greater.

Another thing I've observed is how critical the role of the CEO is when a technology truly is disruptive. In looking back on companies that have successfully launched independent disruptive business units, the CEO always had a foot in both camps. Never have they succeeded when they spin something off in order to get it off the CEO's agenda. The CEOs that did this had extraordinary personal self-confidence, and almost always they were the founders of the companies.

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.

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.

What you need is a fundamental humility - the belief that you can learn from anyone.

I got Type 1 diabetes at 30. It hit me in 1982 when I was a White House Fellow in Washington. I had viral pneumonia. I lost 35 pounds in six weeks. And I couldn't see anything. Everything was blurry. I was always thirsty.

Funding that is focused on the ability to diagnose diseases precisely will just have inestimable value because that's the gate through which precision medicine has to go. Unless you can diagnose the disease precisely, care has to remain in the hands of expensive institutions and expensive caregivers.

Eighty percent of the cases used in the typical MBA program are about successful companies. Students graduate with this notion that 'If I do everything that the people in those cases did, then my organization will grow and be successful, too.'

There needs to be conviction and action behind rules.

Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued.

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.

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.

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?'

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.

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.

The iPod is a proprietary integrated product, although that is becoming quite modular. You can download your music from Amazon as easily as you can from iTunes. You also see modularity organized around the Android operating system that is growing much faster than the iPhone. So I worry that modularity will do its work on Apple.

People under-invest in family because it doesn't pay off until the long term.

Its actually really important that you succeed at what youre succeeding at, but that isnt going to be the measure of your life.

In the first stage of insight-building, all that researchers can do is observe phenomena. Second, they classify the phenomena in a way that helps them simplify the apparent complexities of the world so they can ignore the meaningless differences and draw connections between the things that really seem to matter. Third, based on the classification system, they propose a theory. The theory is a statement of what causes what and why, and under what circumstances.

One reason there are so many short-lived management fads is that their prescriptions were derived and advocated in precisely this way. So managers read about a fad and try it, find that it doesn't work, abandon the effort, and move on to the next thing. In reality, it is usually the case that the faddish prescription was indeed sound advice in certain circumstances, but actually was poor advice in other circumstances.

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.

When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Disruptive technology is a theory. It says this will happen and this is why; it's a statement of cause and effect. In our teaching we have so exalted the virtues of data-driven decision making that in many ways we condemn managers only to be able to take action after the data is clear and the game is over. In many ways a good theory is more accurate than data. It allows you to see into the future more clearly.

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.

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.

No idea for a new growth business ever comes fully shaped. When it emerges, it's half-baked, and it then goes through a process of becoming fully shaped. I've developed tests that I'm hoping can help entrepreneurs manage that shaping process, so that the business plan that comes out the other end has a very high probability of success.

And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited ... When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.

I think this is one reason why the Lord invented the Internet - so members can teach one another how to succeed in assignments the Lord has given us, and to give us opportunities to inspire and bear testimony in a horizontal way.

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.

Having a loving relationship with our spouse or with our children is what leads to the long-term happiness we all seek.

Do not be deceived by impostors.

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.

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!

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.

Children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.