Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.
Interpretation
Disruptive innovations lead to new job opportunities, while efficiency innovations often result in job losses.
This quote by Clayton Christensen highlights the dual nature of innovation in the economy. Disruptive innovations introduce new products or services that transform markets and create new jobs, often in sectors that did not previously exist. On the other hand, innovations aimed at improving efficiency can lead to the elimination of existing jobs, as processes are streamlined and costs are reduced. This underscores the complex relationship between technological advancement and employment dynamics.
In practice
Using this quote in a presentation discussing the impact of technology on the job market.
You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.
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Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development.
Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
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.
Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.
Given that my title at Google is Chief Internet Evangelist, I feel like there is this great challenge before me because we have three billion users, and there are seven billion people in the world.
We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.
I'd always maintained that much of the anarchy and craziness of the early internet had a lot to do with the fact that governments just hadn't realised it was there.
If we really wanted to have a reorientation of the tech industry toward what's best for people, then we would ask the second question, which is, what would be the most time well spent for the thing that people are trying to get out of that situation?
What we can do should never by itself determine what we choose to do, yet this is the way technology tends to work.
Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time
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