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

She was fierce and opaque, and not breakable. — Kate Christensen

For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core. — Clayton 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

Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued. — Clayton Christensen

Disruptive technology is a theory. It says this will happen and this is why; it's a statement of cause and effect. In our teaching we have so exalted the virtues of data-driven decision making that in many ways we condemn managers only to be able to take action after the data is clear and the game is over. In many ways a good theory is more accurate than data. It allows you to see into the future more clearly. — Clayton Christensen

Disruptive technologies typically enable new markets to emerge. — Clayton M Christensen

I've always been kind of a hermit. — Hayden 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

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. — Clayton Christensen

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. — Clayton Christensen

Although the pineapple had been widely disseminated for centuries among the native peoples of South and Central America, it didn't figure in European history until 1493. — Kate Christensen

I love playing around with vintage fabrics and lace. — Helena Christensen

I've concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn't dollars, but the individual people whose lives I've touched. I think that's the way it will work for us all. Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. — Clayton Christensen

Finding my way into a novel is always half the battle. — Kate Christensen

If you ask the average guy on the street to name five companies that have truly transformed themselves over the few decades, Hewlett-Packard would be on everybody's list. You'd also put on this list GE and Johnson & Johnson. — Clayton Christensen

Each of our children during their high school years went to 'early morning seminary' - scripture study classes that met in the home of a church member every school day morning from 6:30 until 7:15. — Clayton Christensen

There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem. — Clayton Christensen

Diabetes is a great example whereby, giving the patient the tools, you can manage yourself very well. — Clayton Christensen

When the functionality of a product or service overshoots what customers can use, it changes the way companies have to compete. When the product isn't yet good enough, the way you compete is by making better products. In order to make better products, the architecture of the product has to be interdependent and proprietary in character. — Clayton Christensen

I don't view it as mystic. I believe that God is our father. He created us. He is powerful because he knows everything. Therefore everything I learn that is true makes me more like my father in heaven. When science seems to contradict religion, then one, the other, or both are wrong, or incomplete. Truth is not incompatible with itself. When I benefit from science it's actually not correct for me to say it resulted from science and not from God. They work in concert. — 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

Christine and I haven't raised our children. A whole community of selfless Christians has contributed to helping them become faithful, competent adults. — Clayton Christensen

Focus is scary - until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development. — Clayton Christensen

In most instances, biotechnology, though a radically different approach, is a sustaining technology: It's a dramatically improved way of targeting problems that we hadn't been able to solve with the conventional approach of mainstream pharmaceutical companies. — Clayton Christensen

It's like in biological evolution: The population will evolve, even though individuals can't. The same thing happens in the corporate world: The population of business units within corporations evolves, even though individual business units can't. That's because the capabilities of business units reside in their processes and their values, and by their very nature, processes and values are inflexible and meant not to change. — Clayton Christensen

I've concluded that getting the categories right is an absolutely crucial step to building useful management theory, and unfortunately too few writers do this. You've got to engage in serious scholarship, and then figure out how to write it in a way that lots of people can understand. — Clayton Christensen

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin. — Kate 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

I grew up in an all-female family - two sisters and a mostly single mother - and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them. — Kate Christensen

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping. — Kate Christensen

In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food. — Kate Christensen

There've been times when I've bought a whole pound of cheese and walked down the street and eaten it in one go. — Helena Christensen

Food is not a means toward resolution. It can't cure heartbreak or solve untenable dilemmas. — Kate Christensen

I was lucky enough to build on the work of a number of people who had already run laps around this theory-building track. The original classification scheme, years ago, distinguished radical from incremental change. The theory said that established firms managed incremental change well, but would be expected to founder when their industry encountered a radical change. — Clayton 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

Another thing I've observed is how critical the role of the CEO is when a technology truly is disruptive. In looking back on companies that have successfully launched independent disruptive business units, the CEO always had a foot in both camps. Never have they succeeded when they spin something off in order to get it off the CEO's agenda. The CEOs that did this had extraordinary personal self-confidence, and almost always they were the founders of the companies. — Clayton Christensen

I assure you, Miss Durham, there is always recourse. Consequence is a faithful companion in all deeds, whether good or bad, and it can teach us like nothing can to change our ways when we have done wrong. Besides, if there is no repentance, then what was the point of God's great sacrifice?" "I do not know," she answered — V.R. 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

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

How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past? — Clayton Christensen

Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success. — Clayton Christensen

I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this. — Kate Christensen

There are companies trying to build business within Saudi Arabia, and what they find is that if they try to bring on locals and teach them how to become senior executives, they just don't show up to work. They are not predictable as to when they'll come in and how much of their hearts are into that opportunity. — Clayton 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 dealmaking. — Clayton Christensen

I still love taking pictures with Polaroid film. For me, it offers the most beautiful way of capturing reality and transferring it onto a flat piece of paper. — Helena 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

I'm not a foodie - I'm an eater: I'm hungry. — Kate Christensen

In literature, older women are not often given center stage. — Kate 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

Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital - oceans of capital - that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation. — Clayton Christensen

All I want is all what my mother wanted for me when she raised me - to be happy. For that, I don't need to be in a relationship. I don't need to have a certain level of respect. I just want to care very much about what I do and be kind to everyone in the process. It's important that I can feel that. That's happiness. — Hayden Christensen

Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group. — Clayton Christensen

From the minute I wake up until I go to bed I think about food. — Helena Christensen

Economics itself offers a parallel that explains why this integration affects creativity. Clay Christensen has written about the "Innovator's Dilemma": the fact that large traditional firms find it rational to ignore new, breakthrough technologies that compete with their core business. The same analysis could help explain why large, traditional media companies will undermine our tradition of free culture. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer. — Lawrence Lessig

In the aftermath of a marriage, you feel helpless and hapless. — Kate 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

Across the Atlantic, in the scattered, far-flung, rural settlements of colonial America, hospitality had become a central concern, and hostesses, like peacocks displaying their iridescent plumage, tried to outdo one another with their creative food displays. — Kate Christensen

Now that I no longer feel lonely, and now that my own past feels resolved in a whole new and very deep way, I am excited to write about the real world, to stay in it. Fiction is an escape, a parallel life, and it was a powerful source of comfort for me when my own life was raw and uncomfortable. I don't feel the burning need to disappear into a fictional character these days. — Kate Christensen

In modelling, there is no point in trying to prove you have a brain, so why even bother? I'd sooner save the energy for something more meaningful. — Helena Christensen

David Levi is a teacher as well as a chef, and, like most teachers, he loves to talk. — Kate Christensen

I have pictures from work that I'm sending to my family. I send them scripts that I'm working on so they can be excited and know what's up with me. — Erika 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 New Nordic diet originated in 2004, when the visionary chefs Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer called a symposium of regional chefs to address the public's increasing consumption of processed foods, additives, highly refined grains, and mass-produced poultry and meat. — Kate Christensen

There are other dimensions of biotechnology. If you think of biotechnology like the Internet, it's not a category - it's an infrastructure that can be deployed to sustain or disrupt. In health care, the most complex problems at the high end have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode by the best, most experienced physicians you can find. — Clayton Christensen

If I have an hour in a city, I go to vintage stores first because it's so much cooler to find a piece that is unique. I love the thought of some girl having worn it before and living her life in it. — Helena Christensen

The phrase 'blue plate special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me. — Kate Christensen

I've always had rock star envy. Unfortunately, writing is a pedestrian, tame occupation done while sitting in coffee-stained pajamas in front of a computer rather than prowling around a huge stage in sweaty leather pants, so I have to get my kicks vicariously. — Kate Christensen

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes. — Kate Christensen

Modelling is a silly, crazy business. — Helena Christensen

[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families
only to find that by then their families were gone. — Larissa MacFarquhar

Don't tell anyone. I'm supposed to be dumb. — Helena Christensen

Reminded of what a diet really is, I began eating more slowly, being more conscious of when I was full. I started to enjoy my buckwheat bread with goat cheese and pureed butternut-squash soup as a response to real hunger. — Kate Christensen

But actually theory is very practical. Gravity is a theory, for example. It allows you to predict that if you step off a cliff you will fall; you don't have to collect data on that. — Clayton 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

Iggy Pop is God, if God looked half that good with his shirt off. — Kate Christensen

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. — Clayton Christensen

Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers. — Clayton Christensen

Like any woman, I worry about my body. — Helena 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

Businesses that distribute information and news are in the business of training and teaching people. — Clayton 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 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

Everyone has their own approach to how they work. — Hayden Christensen

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult. — Kate Christensen

'American Music' is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings. — Kate Christensen

Companies, in fact, are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out. — Clayton Christensen

There's something specific
about the doves' way
of living my life
as a natural result

of today since it's raining — Inger Christensen

I love breasts. I love the female shape. It's crazy - you can have movie posters with men with machine guns but, oh, God forbid you show the nipples! That never ceases to amaze me. — Helena Christensen

It's really intimidating to go on the beach in a bikini. — Helena Christensen

Eating by myself in my own apartment, single and alone again for the first time in many years, I should have felt, but did not feel, sad. Because I had taken the trouble to make myself a real dinner, I felt nurtured and cared for, if only by myself. Eating alone was freeing, too; I didn't have to make conversation. — Kate 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

You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care. — Clayton Christensen

his left shoulder. As Ramirez started in that direction, Jabawski called after him, laughing, "Watch out for the big bad wolf, he's got a mouth on him, too." ### Everything was moving in slow motion. Or at least it appeared to be. Police officers and crime scene technicians swarmed like worker bees from the hive, scouting out their surroundings meticulously, in hope of finding even the most minuscule of clues. I'd spoken to several officers and carefully detailed my actions before finding — Harley 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

I am a serious food lover and Peruvian cuisine is one of the best in the world. — Helena Christensen

So many times I've wanted to crack up, standing there stiff while seven women are crawling round my toes fixing hems and the designer's having a freak-out because the denim cuffs are crooked. I'm on the verge of hysteria. — Helena Christensen

I scrambled to pack my things, glad I owned so little. — Kate Christensen

I was the first f****** hippy to enter this business, you know ... I was one of the first girls to say I don't give a f*** about this whole supermodel thing. — Helena Christensen