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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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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
Every
Make
Metric
Think
Metrics
Thinking
Resolution
Life
Judged
Success
Ends
Live

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You can't find returns in investments you haven't made.
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Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.
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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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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.
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We don't hire ministers or priests to teach and care for us. This forces us to teach and care for each other - and in my view, this is the core of Christian living as Christ taught it.
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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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But actually theory is very practical. Gravity is a theory, for example. It allows you to predict that if you step off a cliff you will fall you don't have to collect data on that.
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Steve Jobs and Apple taught us that profit is not the ultimate goal, but rather a consequence of something greater.
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Management is the most noble of professions if it's practiced well.
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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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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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Ultimately, when you come up with a classification scheme that is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, then the theory can become what Kuhn called a paradigm.
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Every time you take someone figuratively by the hand and introduce him or her to Jesus Christ, you will feel how deeply our Savior loves you and loves the person whose hand is in yours.
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People still cling to this belief that innovation is just random and unpredictable. But if you look closely, there are some real patterns. The companies that recognize and take advantage of those patterns have the real opportunity to create competitive advantage.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Its actually really important that you succeed at what youre succeeding at, but that isnt going to be the measure of your life.
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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