Clayton M. Christensen

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.

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.

Children are ready to learn when they are ready to learn, not necessarily when their parents are ready to teach them.

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.

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.

I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?

There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.

When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.

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.