There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.
Clayton M. ChristensenRead
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.
Interpretation
New business ideas are often incomplete and require refinement over time.
This quote emphasizes that innovative business concepts are rarely perfect when they first appear. Instead, they often begin as rough ideas that need to be developed, tested, and refined through various stages until they achieve their full potential. This process highlights the importance of perseverance, adaptability, and continual improvement in the entrepreneurial journey.
In practice
During a startup pitch, use this quote to illustrate the importance of iteration in business ideas.
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.
Starbucks is not an advertiser; people think we are a great marketing company, but in fact we spend very little money on marketing and more money on training our people than advertising.
I think that the direct conversation is exactly what companies need to earn trust of customers. Admit an error. Fix a problem. Commit to doing better. That is only human.
Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.
Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches.
Kickstarter isn't a profit center, it's an organizer and an instigator.
Business men are to be pitied who do not recognize the fact that the largest side of their secular business is benevolence. ... No man ever manages a legitimate business in this life without doing indirectly far more for other men than he is trying to do for himself.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.