I had a horrible heart attack and still have symptoms of that sometimes. Then cancer, which is in remission. But the stroke is the hardest thing because I just lost my ability to speak and to write. – Clayton M. Christensen
The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That’s when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business. – Clayton M. Christensen
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. – Clayton M. Christensen
A disruptive innovation is a technologically simple innovation in the form of a product, service, or business model that takes root in a tier of the market that is unattractive to the established leaders in an industry. – Clayton M. Christensen
To become the kind of person you want to become, you’ve got to have discipline. It’s easier to keep to your standards 100 percent of the time versus 98 percent of the time. – Clayton M. Christensen
Holiday Inn comes in at the bottom of the market, but they can’t go upmarket except if they emulate the Four Seasons. So they can go up, but they have to emulate the people they’re trying to compete against. They can’t disrupt them, because there isn’t anything about their model that is extendable upmarket. – Clayton M. Christensen
An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they’re already doing in their lives done better. – Clayton M. Christensen
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. – Clayton M. Christensen
By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body. – Clayton M. Christensen
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. – Clayton M. Christensen
Most people have never thought through how they’re going to allocate their time. You need to make a decision in advance. – Clayton M. Christensen
We are awash in content that needs to be taught, yet the vast majority of colleges give a large portion of their faculties’ salaries to fund research. – Clayton M. Christensen
The concept of disruption is about competitive response; it is not a theory of growth. It’s adjacent to growth. But it’s not about growth. – Clayton M. Christensen
There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too. – Clayton M. Christensen
Colleges would compete by adding professors, enhancing programmes or building nicer facilities. So they competed by making institutions better. – Clayton M. Christensen
The single most important factor in our long-term happiness is the relationships we have with our family and close friends. – Clayton M. Christensen
Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That’s not management, that’s deal making. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it’s a magnificent profession. – Clayton M. Christensen
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. – Clayton M. Christensen
In a healthy economy, empowering, sustaining and efficiency innovations operate in balance. A healthy economy creates and sustains more jobs before squeezing out inefficiencies. – Clayton M. Christensen
Most marketers think there’s a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don’t exist. – Clayton M. Christensen
In the Mormon Church, we believe we can be married for all eternity, not till death do you part. As Mom was getting older, she was excited, truly excited, that within a few years she’d be with Dad again. – Clayton M. Christensen
