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How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?

Clayton Christensen

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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
Sense
Past
Make
Data
Future

More quotes by Clayton Christensen

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...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
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Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.
Clayton Christensen
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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
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Management is the most noble of professions if it's practiced well.
Clayton Christensen
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If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.
Clayton Christensen
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I've concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn't dollars, but the individual people whose lives I've touched. I think that's the way it will work for us all. Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
Clayton Christensen
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We have found that companies need to speak a common language, because some of the suggested ways to harness disruptive innovation are seemingly counter-intuitive. If companies don't have that common language, it is hard for them to come to consensus on a counter-intuitive course of action.
Clayton Christensen
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Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.
Clayton Christensen
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Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued.
Clayton Christensen
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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
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Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
Clayton Christensen
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We decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others... Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself - and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too.
Clayton Christensen
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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
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The biggest mistake is an over-reliance on data. Managers will say if there are no data they can take no action. However, data only exist about the past. By the time data become conclusive, it is too late to take actions based on those conclusions.
Clayton Christensen
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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
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There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.
Clayton Christensen
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History is littered with great firms that got killed by disruption. Of course, the personal computer, a technology that first took root as a toy, got Digital Equipment Corporation. Kodak missed the boat for a long time on digital imaging. Sony was slow to get MP3 technology. Microsoft doesn't know what to do with open source software. And so on.
Clayton Christensen
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Innovation simply isn't as unpredictable as many people think. There isn't a cookbook yet, but we're getting there.
Clayton Christensen
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When product performance outstrips the ability of customers to use that performance in an industry, the competitive game changes. Under those circumstances you have to decouple components businesses from assembly businesses.
Clayton Christensen
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Because we employ no professional preachers, it means that every sermon or lesson in church is given by a regular member - women and men, children and grandparents.
Clayton Christensen