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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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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
Careers
Path
Successful
Indirect
Paths
Plenty
Direct
Career

More quotes by Clayton Christensen

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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.
Clayton Christensen
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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.
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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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
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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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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.
Clayton Christensen
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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
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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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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
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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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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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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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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.
Clayton Christensen
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The transformation at the corporate level was achieved by selling off business units in old markets and by creating new business units to pursue the new opportunities. But the individual business units themselves within those transformed corporations were almost inert to change.
Clayton Christensen
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Management is the most noble of professions if it's practiced well.
Clayton Christensen
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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
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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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In a large successful company where your power base as CEO isn't all that secure, it's hard for a CEO to pursue a truly disruptive strategy.
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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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