Top 150 Clayton M. Christensen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

2. “Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

4. “My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

5. “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 M. Christensen

6. “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. – Steve Jobs.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

7. “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

8. “Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

9. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

10. “Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

11. “You can’t find returns in investments you haven’t made.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

12. “We adhere to the saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” while not really questioning whether “it” is “broke.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

13. “How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?”

— Clayton M. Christensen

14. “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 M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

16. “This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

17. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

19. “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

20. “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 M. Christensen

21. “You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn’t care.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

22. “New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences they enable. If.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

23. “As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

24. “If you take away religion, you can’t hire enough police.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

25. “Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital – oceans of capital – that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

26. “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 M. Christensen

27. “I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

28. “The key point here is that large companies typically fail at disruptive innovation because the top management team is dominated by individuals who have been selected for delivery skills, not discovery skills. As a result, most executives at large organizations don’t know how to think different. It isn’t something that they learn within their company, and it certainly isn’t something they are taught in business school. Business schools teach people how to be deliverers, not discoverers.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

29. “Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea, but everyone hijacks the idea to do whatever they want now.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

30. “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 M. Christensen

31. “Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

32. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

33. “If the technology is disruptive, on the other hand, the odds are that at the end of the transition, the leaders will have been toppled and new companies will be on top.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

34. “Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

35. “The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

36. “Three classes of factors affect what an organization can and cannot do: its resources, its processes, and its values.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

37. “Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

38. “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 M. Christensen

39. “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 M. Christensen

40. “Innovation simply isn’t as unpredictable as many people think. There isn’t a cookbook yet, but we’re getting there.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

41. “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

42. “What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?”

— Clayton M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

45. “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 M. Christensen

46. “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

47. “What you need is a fundamental humility – the belief that you can learn from anyone.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

48. “Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

49. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

50. “When I have my interview with God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage – a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life.”

— Clayton M. Christensen