Clayton Christensen Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?
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People who have the drive to achieve spend most of their time on what brings them the most tangible, immediate sense of success. Investments in our family only pay off in the very long term.
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People have an idol they want to be like and try to follow what the idols did. But when you do, you find out you're not very successful and you're not very happy. You try to copy these models, and it doesn't yield successful results.
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The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.
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There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations.
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A sustaining innovation makes better products that you can sell for better profits to your best customers.
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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.
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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.
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Colleges would compete by adding professors, enhancing programmes or building nicer facilities. So they competed by making institutions better.
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There just isn't anything more invigorating than to read an article or hear about an entrepreneur using the term 'disruptive technology' that makes no reference to me as the source. When it's clear they really got the idea and they use it as if it were in everyday parlance, that's the ultimate triumph.
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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.
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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.
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People don't actually want to think about their own health and don't take action until they are sick. Yet employers are very motivated to get their employees healthy, since they bear most of the burden of their health care costs.
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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.
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Funding that is focused on the ability to diagnose diseases precisely will just have inestimable value because that's the gate through which precision medicine has to go. Unless you can diagnose the disease precisely, care has to remain in the hands of expensive institutions and expensive caregivers.
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Managers are already voracious consumers of theory. Every time they make a decision or take action, it's based on some theory that leads them to believe that action will lead to the right result. The problem is, most managers aren't aware of the theories they're using, and they often use the wrong theories for the situation.
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I love my life as a missionary, keeping myself on the front lines. The image in my mind is that God, my general, stands at the door when I go out every morning; and, knowing what the war is like, day after day he gives me his most powerful weapon: his Spirit. For this I am grateful.
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Many of the factors that we think will cause motivation, such as fair pay and a good manager, won't make you love your job. Even if you eliminate what makes you dissatisfied, that doesn't make you motivated. It doesn't make your work rewarding. You just are less bothered by things.
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I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become.
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Most people have never thought through how they're going to allocate their time. You need to make a decision in advance.
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Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research.
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The way I ought to measure my life is in terms of the others I helped to become better and happier people. That's the biggest thing to think about if you're not happy.