Top 95 Clayton M. Christensen Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Management teams aren’t good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.

Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research.

A great book seeks to explain causality, not correlation. It works to point out the circumstances in which it works, and where it doesn’t. And in so doing, it is broadly applicable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The parents of teenagers would love to have a car that won’t go very far or go very fast. They could just cruise around the neighborhood, drive it to school, see their friends, plug it in overnight.

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

Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

As I have studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon, I have come to know through the power of the Spirit of God, that these books contain the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We need to have a better balance between a deliberate strategy and staying open. Because in the end, most of us end up being successful in a career that we never imagined we would be in at the beginning.

Efficiency innovations are a natural part of the economic cycle, but these are the innovations that streamline process and actually reduce the number of available jobs.

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.

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.

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.

Because we employ no professional preachers, it means that every sermon or lesson in church is given by a regular member – women and men, children and grandparents.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m an optimistic person.

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.

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.

When considering a career move, consider the most important assumptions that have to prove true and how you can swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid. Also, remain realistic about the path ahead of you.