Welcome to our collection of quotes by Clayton Christensen. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Clayton Christensen
Clayton Magleby Christensen (April 6, 1952 – January 23, 2020) was an American academic and business consultant who developed the theory of "disruptive innovation", which has been called the most influential business idea of the early 21st century. Christensen introduced "disruption" in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, and it led The Economist to term him "the most influential management thinker of his time."
He served as the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (HBS), and was also a leader and writer in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).
Christensen was also a co-founder of Rose Park Advisors, a venture capital firm, and Innosight, a management consulting and investment firm specializing in innovation.
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.
Do not be deceived by impostors.
When an entrant competitor attacks the low end of any market, the rational reaction of the incumbent firms is to abandon rather than defend it -- because the low end is the least profitable of their possible investments.
Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea.
If you develop a product that gets what the customer is trying to get done, you don't have to advertise; people will just pull it into their lives.
Growth makes management easier. In particular, it makes making labor concessions seem easy. It's when growth stops because you're being disrupted that managing becomes really, really hard, and as a result, most disrupted companies simply disappear.
Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.
Disruption is continuously afoot in every industry, but especially in autos. It is how Toyota, Nissan and Honda bloodied Detroit: They did not start their attack with Lexus, Infiniti and Acura, but with low-end subcompact models branded Corona, Datsun and CVCC.
Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.
Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.
Businesses that distribute information and news are in the business of training and teaching people.
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.
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.
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.
My wife comes most of the times I teach and stands on the front row to help me. She's been wonderfully supportive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.
In a healthy economy, empowering, sustaining and efficiency innovations operate in balance. A healthy economy creates and sustains more jobs before squeezing out inefficiencies.
For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core.
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.
Most people have never thought through how they're going to allocate their time. You need to make a decision in advance.
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.
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.
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.
I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Colleges would compete by adding professors, enhancing programmes or building nicer facilities. So they competed by making institutions better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.
An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?
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.
There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.
There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations.
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.
The single most important factor in our long-term happiness is the relationships we have with our family and close friends.
When product performance outstrips the ability of customers to use that performance in an industry, the competitive game changes. Under those circumstances you have to decouple components businesses from assembly businesses.
Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at.
Innovation simply isn't as unpredictable as many people think. There isn't a cookbook yet, but we're getting there.
The best strategy is a balance between having a deliberate one, and a flexible, or emergent strategy.
Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of just this once.
The answer is the disruptive innovator, an outsider, who creates a product or service for the non-existing consumer in a non-existing market for almost no profit.
Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued.
Investing in our people is going to be costly and scarce -- we need to start doing that!
The biggest mistake is an over-reliance on data. Managers will say if there are no data they can take no action. However, data only exist about the past. By the time data become conclusive, it is too late to take actions based on those conclusions.
In 15 years from now half of US universities may be in bankruptcy ... in the end I'm excited to see that happen. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn't mind.
Ultimately, when you come up with a classification scheme that is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, then the theory can become what Kuhn called a paradigm.
The innovations are far more important because the technology itself has now way to impact the world for good until it's embedded in the business model. Innovation it's the combination of the simplifying technology and the business model.
Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.
Breaking an old business model is always going to require leaders to follow their instinct. There will always be persuasive reasons not to take a risk. But if you only do what worked in the past, you will wake up one day and find that you've been passed by.
Doing deals doesn't yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.
Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.
Lets take the best of our ideas from Global Drucker Forum, and the best of our language, and then focus and clarify.
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.
Longer Version:
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.
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.
If the technology is disruptive, on the other hand, the odds are that at the end of the transition, the leaders will have been toppled and new companies will be on top.
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.
Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea, but everyone hijacks the idea to do whatever they want now.
If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.
My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it's practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team.