Clayton M. Christensen Quotes

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

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.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

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

Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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 M. Christensen

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

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

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

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.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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 M. Christensen

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

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

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

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

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

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

I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

- Clayton M. Christensen

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.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

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

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.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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 M. Christensen

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

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

- Clayton M. Christensen

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.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

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

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.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

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

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.

- Clayton M. Christensen

I helped start a ceramics company called CPS Technologies. We took it public in 1987 at $12 a share. Three months later, there was this horrible cliff: Black Monday. Fidelity had bought 15 percent of our stock, and their algorithm caused them to dump it all onto the market that day. We dropped from $12 to $2.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

- Clayton M. Christensen

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 M. Christensen

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

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

- Clayton M. Christensen

What's unique about the Mormon Church is that it encourages inquiry. I really do think my research and religion are all on the same page. I never could have come up with the notion of disruptive innovations, which went against a lot of conventional wisdom, if I hadn't been raised to always be asking questions.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

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

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

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 M. Christensen

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

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.

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

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

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

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

- Clayton M. Christensen

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

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

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

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

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