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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
Future
Sense
Past
Make
Data

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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.
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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.
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There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.
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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.
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A lot has been written about the Internet bust. From my point of view, it's quite clear the Internet isn't a category the Internet is a technological infrastructure that can be deployed to facilitate a disruptive business model or a sustaining business model.
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The only useful information about the market will be what I create through expeditions into the market, through testing and probing, trial and error, by selling real products to real people who pay real money.
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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.
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Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued.
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There needs to be conviction and action behind rules.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That's not management, that's deal making. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.
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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.
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Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.
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If I know what to spec, and I can measure it, and there are no unpredictable interdependencies between what you do and what I must do in response, then an economist would say that is sufficient information for a market to emerge between you and me.
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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.
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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.
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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