Clayton Christensen [1952-0] American    
Rank: 101
Businessman
Business, Family, Happiness, Morning, Technology, Chance, Education, Friendship, Good, Medical, Relationship, Society, Success, War, Work
| Quote | Tags | Rank |
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| The single most important factor in our long-term happiness is the relationships we have with our family and close friends. | Family, Happiness | 101| Many of the factors that we think will cause motivation, such as fair pay and a good manager, won't make you love your job. Even if you eliminate what makes you dissatisfied, that doesn't make you motivated. It doesn't make your work rewarding. You just are less bothered by things. | Good, Work | 102| 'Disruption' is, at its core, a really powerful idea. Everyone hijacks the idea to do whatever they want now. It's the same way people hijacked the word 'paradigm' to justify lame things they're trying to sell to mankind. | | 103| I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become. We can articulate the culture that we would want to exist in our family, and you can then, as the rest of life happens to you, you can utilize those things to help you become the kind of person you want to be. | Family | 104| There is no evidence that success in business will make us happy people or allow us to have happy families. | Business, Success | 105| The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations. | | 106| The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption. | Business | 107| Understanding motivation is one of the most important things we can do in our lives, because it has such a bearing on why we do the things we do and whether we enjoy them or not. | | 108| For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core. | Education | 109| In an environment where you've got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you'll be successful is actually much higher. | | 110| I don't have my finger on the pulse of corruption in China, but I think most people on the ground would say that as China was emerging from communism, it was a very regulated society, and therefore, it was very corrupt. But as they have deregulated the economy, there just aren't as many opportunities for people to be corrupt. | Society | 111| Do not be deceived by impostors. | | 112| India's prosperity is sectioned by geography, such as in Bangalore, where the information technology industry is prominent. Because they have a conduit out of India, competing in the world by the Internet, it's not regulated in corrupt ways, and it is very prosperous. | Technology | 113| I talk to our kids now that they are grown up, and I ask them about the experiences that had growing up that really had a powerful influence on the way they view the purpose of life. The experiences that really shaped their values - my wife and I have no memory of those experiences! | | 114| I love my life as a missionary, keeping myself on the front lines. The image in my mind is that God, my general, stands at the door when I go out every morning; and, knowing what the war is like, day after day he gives me his most powerful weapon: his Spirit. For this I am grateful. | Morning, War | 115| Whenever we have thanked these men and women for what they have done for us, without exception they have expressed gratitude for having the chance to help - because they grew as they served. | Chance | 116| You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care. | | 117| I got Type 1 diabetes at 30. It hit me in 1982 when I was a White House Fellow in Washington. I had viral pneumonia. I lost 35 pounds in six weeks. And I couldn't see anything. Everything was blurry. I was always thirsty. | | 118| Diabetes is a great example whereby, giving the patient the tools, you can manage yourself very well. | | 119| 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. | | 120| 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. | | 121| During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn't yet adequate to meet customer's needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution - because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way. | | 122| The first two lessons, which we learned early in our efforts to be good member missionaries, have made sharing the Gospel much easier: We simply can't predict who will or won't be interested in the Gospel, and building a friendship is not a prerequisite to inviting people to learn about the Gospel. | Friendship | 123| Having a loving relationship with our spouse or with our children is what leads to the long-term happiness we all seek. | Happiness, Relationship | 124| Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances. | | 125| Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession. | | 126| 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. | | 201| In organizations, once you articulate how success will be measured, everybody tries to game the system so that they are measured in the best possible way. | | 202| There just isn't anything more invigorating than to read an article or hear about an entrepreneur using the term 'disruptive technology' that makes no reference to me as the source. When it's clear they really got the idea and they use it as if it were in everyday parlance, that's the ultimate triumph. | Technology | 203| There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations. | | 204| A major driver of the cost of healthcare in the United States is a compromise that was reached with the American Medical Association in the 1960s when Medicare was first established. | Medical | 205| When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share. | | 206| I think this is one reason why the Lord invented the Internet - so members can teach one another how to succeed in assignments the Lord has given us, and to give us opportunities to inspire and bear testimony in a horizontal way. | | 207| 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. | | 208| We all have jobs in our lives that we must get done. We reach out and bring products into our lives to get these jobs done. Marketing is all about asking, 'What job is the customer trying to accomplish?' | | 209| I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they'll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered while at school. If they don't figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. | | 210| 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. | | 211| Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers. | | 212| 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. | Morning | 213| 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. | | 214| The basic idea that marketing is wrong at its core is one of the main reasons why innovation seems blocked and unpredictable. | | 215| Finding a 'sacrificial lamb' on whom to tag blame for complicated problems is an important instrument in the toolkit of politicians, because it deflects blame for the nation's economic woes away from their own regulatory lapses, economic mismanagement and coddling to labor unions. | | 216| Christine and I haven't raised our children. A whole community of selfless Christians has contributed to helping them become faithful, competent adults. | | 217| As I have studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon, I have come to know through the power of the Spirit of God, that these books contain the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. | | 218| I have continued systematically to study the Book of Mormon and Bible to understand even more deeply what God expects of me and my family while on this earth. | | 219| This is why I belong, and why I believe. I commend to all this same search for happiness and for the truth. | | 220| Colleges would compete by adding professors, enhancing programs, or building nicer facilities. So they competed by making institutions better. | | 221| 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. | | 222| The iPod is a proprietary integrated product, although that is becoming quite modular. You can download your music from Amazon as easily as you can from iTunes. 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. | | 223| If you understand cause and effect, it brings about a set of insights that leads you to a very different place. The knowledge will persuade you that the market isn't organized by customer category or by product category. If you understand the job that consumers need to complete, you can articulate all of the experiences in that job. | | 224| The parents of teenagers would love to have a car that won't go very far or go very fast. They could just cruise around the neighborhood, drive it to school, see their friends, plug it in overnight. | | 225| Venture capital is always wanting to go up market. | | 226| People in private equity complain that they have so much capital and so few places to invest. But you have lots of entrepreneurs trying to raise money at the low end and find that they can't get funding because of this mismatch. I think that there is an opportunity there. | | 301| While I wouldn't say that most entrepreneurs find it easy to get funding, there are certainly more people out there funding technology and healthcare companies than in other areas. | | 302| People don't actually want to think about their own health and don't take action until they are sick. Yet employers are very motivated to get their employees healthy, since they bear most of the burden of their health care costs. | | 303| There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too. So many young people I speak to nowadays think that the only way to get to such a career is by the direct path; but that really only makes sense in certain circumstances. | | 304| 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. I've developed tests that I'm hoping can help entrepreneurs manage that shaping process, so that the business plan that comes out the other end has a very high probability of success. | | 305| People have an idol they want to be like and try to follow what the idols did. But when you do, you find out you're not very successful and you're not very happy. You try to copy these models, and it doesn't yield successful results. | | 306| 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. | | 307| If you're successful and growing, you can manage any way you want to. Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough. | | 308| There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem. | | 309| Empowering innovations transform something that is complicated and expensive into something that is so much more simple and affordable that a much larger population can enjoy it. | | 310| A sustaining innovation makes better products that you can sell for better profits to your best customers. | | 311| Efficiency innovations arise in industries that already exist. They provide existing goods and services at much lower costs. They are not empowering. Efficiency innovators become the low cost providers within an existing framework. | | 312| Efficiency innovations are a natural part of the economic cycle, but these are the innovations that streamline process and actually reduce the number of available jobs. | | 313| 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. | | 314| To focus capital and entrepreneurship into empowering innovation, we should change is the capital gains tax rate. We would be better served by a regressive tax rate, that would become progressively smaller the longer the investment is held. | | 315| 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. | | 316| When you're thinking about your next product or current product and wondering how to make it different so you don't have competition, understand the job the customer needs to get done. | | 317| If we are to develop profound theory to solve the intractable problems in our societally-critical domains... we must learn to crawl into the life of what makes people tick. | | 318| Capitalists seem uninterested in capitalism, even as eager entrepreneurs can't get financing. Businesses and investors sound like the Ancient Mariner, who complained, 'Water, water everywhere - nor any drop to drink.' | | 319| Optimizing return on capital will generate less growth than optimizing return on education. | | 320| The principles of disruptive innovation are indeed intended to be guidelines to assist managers both in introducing disruptive innovations as well as identifying disruptive developments in their market. | | 321| We need to have an understanding of what causes what to happen in the world, and why. | | 322| When considering a career move, consider the most important assumptions that have to prove true and how you can swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid. Also, remain realistic about the path ahead of you. | | 323| Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something, and it doesn't work, and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet... Ultimately, you become commercially successful. | | 324| If you make that decision, that you'll always follow that rule, then your commitment to do it sinks into your heart, and when you realize the benefits of having integrity time after time, it really changes your heart, not just your head. | | 325| 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. | | 326| The path I am trying so hard to follow is in fact the one that God my Father and His Son Jesus Christ want me to pursue. It has brought me deep happiness. | | 401| We don't hire ministers or priests to teach and care for us. This forces us to teach and care for each other - and in my view, this is the core of Christian living as Christ taught it. | | 402| Because we employ no professional preachers, it means that every sermon or lesson in church is given by a regular member - women and men, children and grandparents. | | 403|
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