Clayton Christensen Quotes
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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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When you're thinking about your next product or current product and wondering how to make it different so you don't have competition, understand the job the customer needs to get done.
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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.
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Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.
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Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.
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No idea for a new growth business ever comes fully shaped. When it emerges, it's half-baked, and it then goes through a process of becoming fully shaped.
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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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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.
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We all have jobs in our lives that we must get done. We reach out and bring products into our lives to get these jobs done. Marketing is all about asking, 'What job is the customer trying to accomplish?'
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The first two lessons, which we learned early in our efforts to be good member missionaries, have made sharing the Gospel much easier: We simply can't predict who will or won't be interested in the Gospel, and building a friendship is not a prerequisite to inviting people to learn about the Gospel.
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I got Type 1 diabetes at 30. It hit me in 1982 when I was a White House Fellow in Washington. I had viral pneumonia. I lost 35 pounds in six weeks. And I couldn't see anything. Everything was blurry. I was always thirsty.
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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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There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.
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We need to have a better balance between a deliberate strategy and staying open. Because in the end, most of us end up being successful in a career that we never imagined we would be in at the beginning.
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The ability to share the gospel isn't a 'gift' that has been given to only a few Latter-day Saints and denied to the rest.
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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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Management is getting people together to figure out how to transform inputs into outputs. In the process of figuring out the process of how people work together, you've got to figure out who's got what responsibilities, and how do they work together.
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I'd been raised Mormon, but there comes a time where you are not following what you've been taught, but discovering for yourself if it's true.
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The iPod is a proprietary integrated product, although that is becoming quite modular. You can download your music from Amazon as easily as you can from iTunes. You also see modularity organized around the Android operating system that is growing much faster than the iPhone. So I worry that modularity will do its work on Apple.
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Eighty percent of the cases used in the typical MBA program are about successful companies. Students graduate with this notion that 'If I do everything that the people in those cases did, then my organization will grow and be successful, too.'
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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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The world is a nested space, and so we have our brain as a person, and people are members of teams, and teams are part of business units, and business units are parts of corporations, and corporations are part of industries, which are part of economies.
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The basic idea that marketing is wrong at its core is one of the main reasons why innovation seems blocked and unpredictable.
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For online universities, like Liverpool and the University of Phoenix, if prices drop by 60%, they still make money. But for the vast majority of traditional universities, if the prices fall by 10%, they are bankrupt; they have no wriggle room.