Top 150 Clayton M. Christensen Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

108. “The transformation at the corporate level was achieved by selling off business units in old markets and by creating new business units to pursue the new opportunities. But the individual business units themselves within those transformed corporations were almost inert to change.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

109. “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

110. “Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

111. “A good theory doesn’t change its mind: it doesn’t apply only to some companies or people, and not to others. It is a general statement of what causes what, and why.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

112. “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

113. “Necessity remains the mother of invention.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

114. “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

115. “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

116. “First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies.”

— 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. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

128. “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

129. “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

130. “With few exceptions, the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms’ managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

131. “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

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. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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. “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

138. “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

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Clayton M. Christensen

145. “When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.”

— Clayton M. Christensen

146. “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

147. “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

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. “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

150. “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