Clayton M. Christensen quotes:

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  • The single most important factor in our long-term happiness is the relationships we have with our family and close friends.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • In a healthy economy, empowering, sustaining and efficiency innovations operate in balance. A healthy economy creates and sustains more jobs before squeezing out inefficiencies.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Most people have never thought through how they're going to allocate their time. You need to make a decision in advance.

  • There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Colleges would compete by adding professors, enhancing programmes or building nicer facilities. So they competed by making institutions better.

  • 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.

  • Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of "just this once.

  • 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."

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.

  • 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.

  • 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."

  • The financial doctrines so zealously followed by American companies might help optimize capital when it is scarce. But capital is abundant. If we are to see our economy really grow, we need to encourage migratory capital to become productive capital - capital invested for the long-term in empowering innovations.

  • I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?

  • Holiday Inn comes in at the bottom of the market, but they can't go upmarket except if they emulate the Four Seasons. So they can go up, but they have to emulate the people they're trying to compete against. They can't disrupt them, because there isn't anything about their model that is extendable upmarket.

  • There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 deal making. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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