Clayton M. Christensen

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

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.

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.

There is no evidence that success in business will make us happy people or allow us to have happy families.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently, the world is awash in capital, but the innovations we need to advance aren't there.

I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A great book seeks to explain causality, not correlation. It works to point out the circumstances in which it works, and where it doesn't. And in so doing, it is broadly applicable.

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.

Having a loving relationship with our spouse or with our children is what leads to the long-term happiness we all seek.