Quote

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.

Clayton Christensen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Clayton Christensen
Age: 67 †
Born: 1952
Born: April 6
Died: 2020
Died: January 23
Economist
Missionary
Priest
Professor
University Teacher
Writer
Salt Lake City
Utah
Clayton Magleby Christensen
Jobs
Products
Sharp
Back
Promise
Odds
Done
Development
Holds
Mean
Realize
Turning
Trying
Realizing
Anyway
Never
Focus
Customers
Greatly
Success
Scary
Markets
Means
Product
Improving

More quotes by Clayton Christensen

Image
Regulatory fiat cannot create a market at a technologically interdependent interface. And by the same token, regulation and so-called monopoly power rarely prevail at modular interfaces between stages of value-added technology.
Clayton Christensen
Image
If the theory accurately predicts what they [scientists] see, it confirms that it's a good theory. If they see something that the theory didn't lead them to believe, that's what Thomas Kuhn calls an anomaly. The anomaly requires a revised theory - and you just keep going through the cycle, making a better theory.
Clayton Christensen
Image
Often they [writers on the study of management] have a point of view based upon intuition and experience. They then offer a cadence of two-paragraph examples carefully selected to prove their theory, and then they write one size fits all books. The message is, If you'd do what these companies did, you'd be successful too.
Clayton Christensen
Image
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.
Clayton Christensen
Image
Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued.
Clayton Christensen
Image
Capitalism has taught us that markets are always more efficient than hierarchical managerial coordination. But in a situation where those three conditions aren't met, I can't outsource or partner with you because markets don't function in the absence of sufficient information.
Clayton Christensen
Image
The innovations are far more important because the technology itself has now way to impact the world for good until it's embedded in the business model. Innovation it's the combination of the simplifying technology and the business model.
Clayton Christensen
Image
Management has to provide the coordinating mechanism between what the supplier provides and what the user needs in not-good-enough situations where product architecture is consequently interdependent. Management always beats markets when there is not sufficient information.
Clayton Christensen
Image
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.
Clayton Christensen
Image
There are other dimensions of biotechnology. If you think of biotechnology like the Internet, it's not a category - it's an infrastructure that can be deployed to sustain or disrupt. In health care, the most complex problems at the high end have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode by the best, most experienced physicians you can find.
Clayton Christensen
Image
The answer is the disruptive innovator, an outsider, who creates a product or service for the non-existing consumer in a non-existing market for almost no profit.
Clayton Christensen
Image
...it's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.
Clayton Christensen
Image
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.
Clayton Christensen
Image
Its actually really important that you succeed at what youre succeeding at, but that isnt going to be the measure of your life.
Clayton Christensen
Image
How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?
Clayton Christensen
Image
If a company truly wants to resolve the innovator's dilemma, it does need to be able to create wave after wave of disruptive innovation. And those disruptive innovations will typically grow to the point where they do cause some pain for leading companies. But most disruptive innovations create substantial new growth before they cause that pain.
Clayton Christensen
Image
Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.
Clayton Christensen
Image
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.
Clayton Christensen
Image
In the study of management, unfortunately, many writers have been so anxious to articulate a theory in the form of, If you do this, this will result, that they never go through this careful effort.
Clayton Christensen
Image
I have been blessed to see visions of eternity and events in my future that have been important for me to foresee, have been revealed to me.
Clayton Christensen