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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

More quotes by 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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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.
Clayton Christensen
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There's usually some process by which a potentially great idea gets prostituted into something lacklustre, or by which the wrong idea gets put forward.
Clayton Christensen
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There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.
Clayton Christensen
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Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.
Clayton Christensen
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Steve Jobs and Apple taught us that profit is not the ultimate goal, but rather a consequence of something greater.
Clayton Christensen
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An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.
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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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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Because of the disruption phenomenon - technological progress outstripping the ability of customers to utilize it - the general tendency is for the money to migrate toward the subsystems.
Clayton Christensen
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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.
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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There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.
Clayton Christensen
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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
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To prop up the stock price, managers have to turn down the screws on everybody. That forces them to cancel all the projects that would lead to future growth in order to drop money to the bottom line. This is HP's dilemma today. Once a company's growth has stopped, the game as we have known it is over. It's a scary thing.
Clayton Christensen
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If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.
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
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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.
Clayton Christensen
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Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven't asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question - you have to want to know - in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.
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