Clayton M Christensen Quotes & Sayings

The authors, academics from Northeastern University, Harvard University, and the University of Houston, concluded that Google Flu Trends had wildly overestimated the number of flu cases in the United States for more than two years. The article, "The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis," concluded that the errors were, at least in part, due to the decisions made by GFT engineers about what to include in their models - mistakes the academics dubbed "algorithmic dynamics" and "big data hubris. — Clayton M Christensen

As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg. — Clayton M Christensen

There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well. — 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

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

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

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

Disruptive technologies typically enable new markets to emerge. — 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

At its zenith Sears accounted for more than 2 percent of all retail sales in the United States. It pioneered several innovations critical to the success of today's most admired retailers: for example, supply chain management, store brands, catalogue retailing, and credit card sales. The esteem in which Sears' management was held shows in this 1964 excerpt from Fortune: "How did Sears do it? In a way, the most arresting aspect of its story is that there was no gimmick. Sears opened no big bag of tricks, shot off no skyrockets. Instead, it looked as though everybody in its organization simply did the right thing, easily and naturally. And their cumulative effect was to create an extraordinary powerhouse of a company. — Clayton M Christensen

Resisting the temptation whose logic was "In this extenuating circumstance, just this once, it's OK" has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.
The lesson I learned from this is that it's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to "just this once," based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you'll regret where you end up. You've got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place. — 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 techniques that worked so extraordinarily well when applied to sustaining technologies, however, clearly failed badly when applied to markets or applications that did not yet exist. — Clayton M Christensen

You'll see that without theory, we're at sea without a sextant. — Clayton M Christensen

Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what's inside of you, and inside of your work. — Clayton M Christensen

Interestingly, even though MinuteClinic employs no doctors in its clinics, it has never been sued for malpractice. The reason is that malpractice lawsuits arise primarily in cases of mis-diagnosis and flawed therapeutic judgment.16 Because MinuteClinic practices in the realm of precision medicine, its diagnoses are precise and its therapies predictably effective. — 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

The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors' actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change. — 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

I used to think that if you cared for other people, you need to study sociology or something like it. But ... .I [have] concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person's work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators. — 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

They are always motivated to go up-market, and almost never motivated to defend the new or low-end markets that the disruptors find attractive. We call this phenomenon asymmetric motivation. It is the core of the innovator's dilemma, and the beginning of the innovator's solution. — Clayton M Christensen

In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? 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

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

Remember that it is changes in the slope of the platform, not the level of the platform, that create shareholder value at an above-average rate. — 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

I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail? — Clayton M Christensen

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. - Steve Jobs — Clayton M Christensen

the breakthrough researcher first discovers the fundamental causal mechanism behind the phenomena of success. This allows those who are looking for "an answer" to get beyond the wings-and-feathers mind-set of copying the attributes of successful companies. — Clayton M Christensen

Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning. — Clayton M Christensen

Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else. — 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

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

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

Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of just this once. — Clayton M Christensen

you perfect results. What I can promise you is that you won't get it right if you don't commit to keep trying. — Clayton M Christensen

It's easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time. — Clayton M Christensen

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. — 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

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

American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet. — 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 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

In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn't offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It's really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, "I raised a good son or a good daughter." You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers - even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness. — Clayton M Christensen

I felt that I could look back on my life and think about lots of folks that I helped become better folks. And I've tried to be as good a man as I could be. — Clayton M Christensen

Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough. — Clayton M Christensen

When people encounter a significant threat, a response called "threat rigidity" sets in. The instinct of threat rigidity is to cease being flexible and to become "command and control" oriented - to focus everything on countering the threat in order to survive. — Clayton M Christensen

... I came to understand that while many of us might default to measuring our lives by summary statistics, such as number of people presided over, number of awards, or dollars accumulated in a bank, and so on, the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people. — 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

is embedded in an organization in which most people are continually questioning why the project is being done at all. Projects make sense to people if they address the needs of important customers, if they positively impact the organization's needs for profit and growth, and if participating in the project enhances the career opportunities of talented employees. When a project doesn't have these characteristics, its manager spends much time and energy justifying why it merits resources and cannot manage the project as effectively. Frequently — Clayton M Christensen

For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress. — Clayton M Christensen

Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it. — Clayton M Christensen

I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey. — 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

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

Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time. — Clayton M Christensen

When commercializing disruptive technologies, they found or developed new markets that valued the attributes of the disruptive products, rather than search for a technological breakthrough so that the disruptive product could compete as a sustaining technology in mainstream markets. — 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

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

In fact, how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend. — Clayton M Christensen

Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives. — Clayton M Christensen

When the corporation's investment capital becomes impatient for growth, good money becomes bad money because it triggers a subsequent cascade of inevitable incorrect decisions. Innovators who seek funding for the disruptive innovations that could ultimately fuel the company's growth with a high probability of success now find that their trial balloons get shot down because they can't get big enough fast enough. Managers of most disruptive businesses can't credibly project that the business will become very big very fast, because new-market disruptions need to compete against nonconsumption and must follow an emergent strategy process. Compelling them to project big numbers forces them to declare a strategy that confidently crams the innovation into a large, existing, and obvious market whose size can be statistically substantiated. This means competing against consumption. — 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

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

Do you understand the real reason why your customers choose your products or services? Or why they choose something else instead? How do your products or services help your customers to make progress in their lives? In which circumstances are they trying to make that progress? What are the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of this progress? What is competing with your products and services to address these jobs? Are there competitors outside of those included in the traditional view of your industry? — Clayton M Christensen

If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late. — Clayton M Christensen

We could cite many cases of companies' similar attempts to create new-growth platforms after the core business had matured. They follow an all-too-similar pattern. When the core business approaches maturity and investors demand new growth, executives develop seemingly sensible strategies to generate it. Although they invest aggressively, their plans fail to create the needed growth fast enough; investors hammer the stock; management is sacked; and Wall Street rewards the new executive team for simply restoring the status quo ante: a profitable but low-growth core business.4 — Clayton M Christensen

If present rates of improvement continue, however, we would expect the cruising range of electric cars, for example, to intersect with the average range demanded in the mainstream market by 2015, and electric vechicle acceleration to intersect with mainstream demands by 2020. — 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

You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented. — 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 this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets. — 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

The past is a good predictor of the future only when conditions in the future resemble conditions in the past. And what works for a firm in one context might not work for another firm in a different context. — Clayton M Christensen

Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don't want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain — 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

As successful companies mature, employees gradually come to assume that the priorities they have learned to accept, and the ways of doing things and methods of making decisions that they have employed so successfully, are the right way to work. Once members of the organization begin to adopt ways of working and criteria for making decisions by assumption, rather than by conscious decision, then those processes and values come to constitute the organization's culture. 7 As companies grow from a few employees to hundreds and thousands, the challenge of getting all employees to agree on what needs to be done and how it should be done so that the right jobs are done repeatedly and consistently can be daunting for even the best managers. Culture is a powerful management tool in these situations. Culture enables employees to act autonomously and causes them to act consistently. Hence, the location of the — Clayton M Christensen

Probably the most daunting challenge in delivering growth is that if you fail once to deliver it, the odds that you ever will be able to deliver in the future are very low. — Clayton M Christensen

The innovator's dilemma: Should we invest to protect the least profitable end of our business, so that we can retain our least loyal, most price-sensitive customers? Or should we invest to strengthen our position in the most profitable tiers of our business, with customers who reward us with premium prices for better products? — Clayton M Christensen

The fact that hospitals and physicians' practices are not job-focused, but instead aspire to do anything for anybody, has caused them not to be integrated correctly. In their current configuration, they cannot be consumer-driven. — Clayton M Christensen

No other occupation offers more ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. I drew heavily upon this learning to mold my likeness. From these parts of my life, I distilled the likeness of what I wanted to become:
- A man who is dedicated to helping improve the lives of other people
- A kind, honest, forgiving, and selfless husband, father, and friend
- A man who just doesn't just believe in God, but who believes God — Clayton M Christensen

Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don't even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful. — Clayton M Christensen

Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. There — Clayton M Christensen

School is one of the things that children might hire to do the job. But the job is that children need to feel successful - every — 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

Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you'll never become that person. — Clayton M Christensen

Understand and harness the principles of disruptive innovation. — Clayton M Christensen

In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge. — Clayton M Christensen

When I have my interview with my God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage - a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics of that matter in measuring my life. This realization, which occurred nearly fifteen years ago, guided me every day to seek opportunities to help people in ways tailored to their individual circumstances. My happiness and my sense of worth has been immeasurably improved as a result. — Clayton M Christensen

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. — Clayton M Christensen

In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. — Clayton M Christensen

Managers may think they control the flow of resources in their firms, in the end it is really customers and investors who dictate how money will be spent because companies with investment patterns that don't satisfy their customers and investors don't survive. — 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

We will get growth and affordability in health care not by replicating the expertise of today's physicians in the form of new physicians. We will get it by embodying their expertise in devices and equipment, so expertise becomes widely available, more affordable, and much easier to obtain. This — 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

There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too. — Clayton M Christensen

There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations. — 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 evidence summarized in this matrix may be of some use to venture capital investors, as a general way to frame the riskiness of proposed investments. It suggests that start-ups which propose to commercialize a breakthrough technology that is essentially sustaining in character have a far lower likelihood of success than start-ups whose vision is to use proven technology to disrupt an established industry with something that is simpler, more reliable, and more convenient. — Clayton M Christensen