Top 150 Clayton M. Christensen Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

53. “Many blessings and friendships have come into our lives from our trying to share the gospel. But this blessing has been one of the best: Having the missionaries regularly help us as a family teach the gospel to new and old friends through the power of the Holy Ghost has profoundly affected the faith of our five children and brought the Spirit of God into our home.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

54. “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 weve taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when its too late.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

55. “In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

56. “If good management practice drives the failure of successful firms faced with disruptive technological change, then the usual answers to companies, problems – planning better, working harder, becoming more customer- driven, and taking a longer-term perspective – all exacerbate the problem.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

57. “Predictable marketing requires an understanding of the circumstances in which customers buy or use things. Specifically, customers – people and companies – have “jobs” that arise regularly and need to get done. When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can “hire” to get the job done.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

58. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

59. “In fact, how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

60. “Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

61. “What has to prove true for this to work?”

— Clayton M. Christensen

62. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

63. “I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

64. “Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

65. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

66. “There needs to be conviction and action behind rules.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

67. “Investing in our people is going to be costly and scarce – we need to start doing that!”

— Clayton M. Christensen

68. “If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

69. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

70. “There are no quick fixes for the fundamental problems of life.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

71. “The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

72. “When my invitation centered on how the Church would interest them, Tom wasn’t interested. But when I asked for help, Tom said, “Sure.” He and his wife have become wonderful members of our ward.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

73. “Sound managerial decisions are at the very root of their impending fall from industry leadership.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

74. “The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

75. “Each of us may have a different process for committing to our likeness. But what is universal is that your intent must be to answer this question: who do I truly want to become?”

— Clayton M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

77. “In the study of management, unfortunately, many writers have been so anxious to articulate a theory in the form of, “If you do this, this will result,” that they never go through this careful effort.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

78. “An organization’s capabilities reside in two places. The first is in its processes – the methods by which people have learned to transform inputs of labor, energy, materials, information, cash, and technology into outputs of higher value. The second is in the organization’s values, which are the criteria that managers and employees in the organization use when making prioritization decisions.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

79. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

80. “If you just look at the data, you are led to believe that things are getting better, rather than worse. That’s why the fall is really precipitous, once you hit the ceiling.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

81. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

82. “People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror – because data is only available about the past.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

83. “The techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

84. “In sacrificing for something worthwhile, you deeply strengthen your commitment to it.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

85. “It is a company’s customers who effectively control what it can and cannot do.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

86. “The only useful information about the market will be what I create through expeditions into the market, through testing and probing, trial and error, by selling real products to real people who pay real money.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

87. “The outsourcing gurus have been driving the theory, and they are saying everybody ought always to do this. But it is really contingent on where you are on the spectrum from “not good enough” to “more than good enough,” relative to each tier of the market.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

88. “There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

89. “I don’t view it as mystic. I believe that God is our father. He created us. He is powerful because he knows everything. Therefore everything I learn that is true makes me more like my father in heaven. When science seems to contradict religion, then one, the other, or both are wrong, or incomplete. Truth is not incompatible with itself. When I benefit from science it’s actually not correct for me to say it resulted from science and not from God. They work in concert.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

90. “In a large successful company where your power base as CEO isn’t all that secure, it’s hard for a CEO to pursue a truly disruptive strategy.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

91. “The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer’s life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request. In hindsight, breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they’re fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have missed.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

92. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

93. “Businesses want to think in terms of categories. Consumers want us to think in terms of their needs.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

95. “For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

96. “Regulatory fiat cannot create a market at a technologically interdependent interface. And by the same token, regulation and so-called monopoly power rarely prevail at modular interfaces between stages of value-added technology.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

98. “There are whole industries, such as venture capital, that are currently organized around the belief that innovation is essentially a game of playing the odds. But it’s time to topple that tired paradigm. I’ve spent twenty years gathering evidence so that you can put your time, energy, and resources into creating products and services that you can predict, in advance, customers will be eager to hire. Leave relying on luck to the other guys.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

99. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

100. “None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.”

— Clayton M. Christensen