Top 150 Clayton M. Christensen Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I have healed the sick by the power of the God. I have spoken with the gift of tongues.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

103. “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

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

105. “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

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

107. “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

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

109. “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

110. “To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

111. “In most instances, biotechnology, though a radically different approach, is a sustaining technology: It’s a dramatically improved way of targeting problems that we hadn’t been able to solve with the conventional approach of mainstream pharmaceutical companies.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

112. “Creating the right experiences and then integrating around them to solve a job, is critical for competitive advantage. That’s because while it may be easy for competitors to copy products, it’s difficult for them to copy experiences that are well integrated into your company’s processes. But to do all this well takes a holistic.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

113. “Whenever we have thanked these men and women for what they have done for us, without exception they have expressed gratitude for having the chance to help – because they grew as they served.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

114. “Disruptive innovations, in contrast, don’t attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. Rather, they disrupt and redefine that trajectory by introducing products and services that are not as good as currently available products. But disruptive technologies offer other benefits – typically, they are simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers.3.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

115. “When a technology, regardless of how different and difficult it is, sustains the trajectory of performance improvement, my research asserts that the leaders in the prior generation of technology are likely to end up on top of their industry at the end of the transition.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

116. “Necessity remains the mother of invention.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

117. “When product performance outstrips the ability of customers to use that performance in an industry, the competitive game changes. Under those circumstances you have to decouple components businesses from assembly businesses.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

118. “On one side of the equation, there are the elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

119. “Lets take the best of our ideas from Global Drucker Forum, and the best of our language, and then focus and clarify.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

120. “Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

121. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

122. “A lot has been written about the Internet bust. From my point of view, it’s quite clear the Internet isn’t a category; the Internet is a technological infrastructure that can be deployed to facilitate a disruptive business model or a sustaining business model.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

123. “Management has to provide the coordinating mechanism between what the supplier provides and what the user needs in not-good-enough situations where product architecture is consequently interdependent. Management always beats markets when there is not sufficient information.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

124. “If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

125. “We don’t hire ministers or priests to teach and care for us. This forces us to teach and care for each other – and in my view, this is the core of Christian living as Christ taught it.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

126. “Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you’re good at. And.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

127. “Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

128. “Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

129. “There’s usually some process by which a potentially great idea gets prostituted into something lacklustre, or by which the wrong idea gets put forward.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

130. “One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

131. “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.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

132. “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. – C. S. Lewis.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

133. “It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation about happiness without understanding what makes each of us tick. When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers – and even unhappy lives – it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

134. “With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

135. “We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

136. “Children need to do more than learn new skills. The theory of capabilities suggests they need to be challenged. They need to solve hard problems. They need to develop values. When you find yourself providing more and more experiences that are not giving children an opportunity to be deeply engaged, you are not equipping them with the processes they need to succeed in the future.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

137. “Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, rather than what those customers really need. What’s missing is empathy: a deep understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

138. “One of the most common versions of this mistake that high-potential young professionals make is believing that investments in life can be sequenced.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

139. “But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think. He then reached a bold decision about what to do, on his own.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

140. “Innovation is less about producing something new and more about enabling something new and important for customers.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

141. “It is important to address hygiene factors such as a safe and comfortable working environment, relationship with managers and colleagues, enough money to look after your family – if you don’t have these things, you’ll experience dissatisfaction with your work. But these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job – they will just stop you from hating it.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

142. “On the one hand, if you have a strategy that really is working, you need to deliberately focus to keep everyone working together in the right direction. At the same time, however, that focus can easily cause you to dismiss as a distraction what could actually turn out to be the next big thing.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

143. “These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

144. “They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation. By approaching a disruptive business with the mindset that they can’t know where the market is, managers would identify what critical information about new markets is most necessary and in what sequence that information is needed.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

145. “Given that 93 percent of companies that ended up being successful had to change their initial strategy, any capital that demands that the early company become very big, very fast, will almost always drive the business off a cliff instead. A big company will burn through money much faster, and a big organization is much harder to change than a small one.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

146. “It is very difficult for a company whose cost structure is tailored to compete in high-end markets to be profitable in low-end markets as well.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

147. “I’m not advocating throwing kids straight into the deep end to see whether they can swim. Instead, it’s a case of starting early to find simple problems for them to solve on their own, problems that can help them build their processes – and a healthy self-esteem. As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me – but rather from what they didn’t do for me.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

148. “Getting something wrong doesn’t mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

149. “At a more serious level, the desirability of aligning our actions with the more powerful laws of nature, society, and psychology, in order to lead a productive life, is a central theme in many works, particularly the ancient Chinese classic, Tao te Ching.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

150. “Self-esteem – the sense that “I’m not afraid to confront this problem and I think I can solve it” – doesn’t come from abundant resources.”

— Clayton M. Christensen