Clayton M. Christensen Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

The transition from proprietary architecture to open modular architecture just happens over and over again. It happened in the personal computer. Although it didn't kill Apple's computer business, it relegated Apple to the status of a minor player. … You also see modularity organized around the Android operating system that is growing much faster than the iPhone. So I worry that modularity will do its work on Apple.

Clayton M. Christensen
Children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

Clayton M. Christensen
Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

Clayton M. Christensen
The only useful information about the market will be what I create through expeditions into the market, through testing and probing, trial and error, by selling real products to real people who pay real money.

Clayton M. Christensen
Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business.

Clayton M. 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 M. 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 M. Christensen
It is a company's customers who effectively control what it can and cannot do.

Clayton M. Christensen
We decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others... Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself - and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too.

Clayton M. Christensen
Our findings support many of the conclusions of the resource dependence theorists, who contend that a firm's scope for strategic change is strongly bounded by the interests of external entities (customers, in this study) who provide the resources the firm needs to survive.

Clayton M. 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 M. Christensen
I think [the Vista fiasco] will allow [Apple] to survive for a bit longer.

Clayton M. 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.

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
Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.

Clayton M. Christensen
[There is a distinguishes between] low-end disruption which targets customers who do not need the full performance valued by customers at the high end of the market and "new-market disruption" that targets customers that could previously not be served profitably by the incumbent.

Clayton M. Christensen
Low-end disruption occurs when the rate at which products improve exceeds the rate at which customers can adopt the new performance.

Clayton M. Christensen
Only the general manager can mold the resources, processes, and values that affect innovation, into a coherent capability to develop and launch superior new products and services repeatedly.

Clayton M. Christensen
Adrian Slywotzky believes the Internet will overturn the inefficient push model of supplier-customer interaction. He predicts that in all sorts of markets, customers will use choiceboards—interactive, on-line systems that let people design their own products by choosing from a menu of attributes, prices, and delivery options. And he explores how the shifting role of the customer—from passive recipient to active designer—will change the way companies compete.

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

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 M. Christensen
Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself — and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves.

Clayton M. Christensen
The prediction of [my disruption] theory would be that Apple won't succeed with the iPhone. They've launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It's not [truly] disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited.

Clayton M. Christensen
Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream

Clayton M. Christensen
This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

Clayton M. Christensen
So the people using the Android operating system are now Motorola, Samsung, LG. And they are killing Apple: now, Android accounts for about 80 percent of the market.

Clayton M. Christensen
Doing deals doesn't yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

Clayton M. Christensen
All of the points that [Professor Lepore] raised were not just wrong, but they were lies. Ours is the only theory in business that actually has been tested in the marketplace over and over again.... And for her to take that on, to take me on and the theory on – I don't know where the meanness came from.

Clayton M. Christensen
The concept of the value network — the context within which a firm identifies and responds to customers' needs, solves problems, procures input, reacts to competitors, and strives for profit — is central to this synthesis.

Clayton M. Christensen
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

Clayton M. Christensen