There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations. – Clayton M. Christensen
In the universities, we teach you what we decide you need to know. And the employers find out when they hire people that students didn’t learn what we needed them to learn. Online learning offerings, like the University of Phoenix, have relationships with employers and teach what you need to know. – Clayton M. Christensen
By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption. – Clayton M. Christensen
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. – Clayton M. Christensen
There are a lot of companies – not just Sony and Kodak – that have spent a lot of money trying to make the quality of the digital images comparable with film. But when you’re sending these things over the Internet, they don’t have to be high quality. – Clayton M. Christensen
As a general rule, if you have a product that doesn’t get the job done that a customer is needing to get done, then often you have to offer it for zero. Because if you ask for money for it – because if it doesn’t do the job well, they won’t pay for it. – Clayton M. Christensen
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. – Clayton M. Christensen
Every city and town in America would be bankrupt if they kept their books the way private-sector companies keep their books – because of the obligation cities and towns have taken upon themselves to provide health care for their retirees. – Clayton M. Christensen
What’s unique about the Mormon Church is that it encourages inquiry. I really do think my research and religion are all on the same page. I never could have come up with the notion of disruptive innovations, which went against a lot of conventional wisdom, if I hadn’t been raised to always be asking questions. – Clayton M. Christensen
One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend. – Clayton M. Christensen
My wife comes most of the times I teach and stands on the front row to help me. She’s been wonderfully supportive. – Clayton M. Christensen
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. – Clayton M. Christensen
The only way all people can have the opportunity to choose or reject the gospel of Jesus Christ is for us, without judgment, to invite them to follow the Savior. – Clayton M. Christensen
In our personal lives, we have a lot of businesses going on. I have a profession, I’m a father, a spouse, a good member of my community. How much of my time and energy can I allocate to each of those things? What I allocate becomes the strategy I have for my family, and everything else. – Clayton M. Christensen
Things happen to us in unpredictable ways, but the effect that that has on the kind of people who we become actually is not only open to chance – we can influence it in pretty profound ways. – Clayton M. Christensen
What the purpose of my life is about is I want to become the kind of person that God wants me to become, and through my study of the scriptures I can articulate the kind of person that God would be happy if I become. – Clayton M. Christensen
Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It’s when growth stops that things get tough. – Clayton M. Christensen
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. – Clayton M. Christensen
For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core. – Clayton M. Christensen
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 we’ve taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when it’s too late. – Clayton M. Christensen
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. – Clayton M. Christensen
I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become. – Clayton M. Christensen
When a company identifies how to integrate the processes needed to give the consumer a sense of job completion, it can blow away the competition. A product is easy to copy, but experiences are very hard to replicate. – Clayton M. Christensen
The financial doctrines so zealously followed by American companies might help optimize capital when it is scarce. But capital is abundant. If we are to see our economy really grow, we need to encourage migratory capital to become productive capital – capital invested for the long-term in empowering innovations. – Clayton M. Christensen
Relative to the taxi industry, Uber is a sustaining innovation; that is, it makes customers’ lives better. Uber targeted mainstream markets with a better service for existing customers, and it succeeded in serving them better than the incumbents. – Clayton M. Christensen
As a general rule, when a new industry takes root, and the first products emerge in a wave, almost always the architecture of the product will be proprietary and interdependent in character. – Clayton M. Christensen
Almost always, great new ideas don’t emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before. – Clayton M. Christensen
American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet. – Clayton M. Christensen
I wouldn’t say there isn’t a direct path to a successful career. There are people who knew exactly what they wanted to do from a very young age, weren’t going to be diverted, and then they just went out and achieved it. – Clayton M. Christensen
The key is not to figure out what the best people are doing and try to emulate it – rather, figure out what causes people and companies to be successful. – Clayton M. Christensen
