Clayton M. Christensen : (15)

" In our personal lives, we have a lot of businesses going on. I have a profession, I’m a father, a spouse, a good member of my community. How much of my time and energy can I allocate to each of those things? What I allocate becomes the strategy I have for my family, and everything else. " - Clayton M. Christensen

" Holiday Inn comes in at the bottom of the market, but they can’t go upmarket except if they emulate the Four Seasons. So they can go up, but they have to emulate the people they’re trying to compete against. They can’t disrupt them, because there isn’t anything about their model that is extendable upmarket. " - Clayton M. Christensen

" There are a lot of companies – not just Sony and Kodak – that have spent a lot of money trying to make the quality of the digital images comparable with film. But when you’re sending these things over the Internet, they don’t have to be high quality. " - Clayton M. Christensen

" Management teams aren’t good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers. " - Clayton M. Christensen

" Companies, in fact, are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out. " - Clayton M. Christensen

" Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances. " - Clayton M. Christensen

" We have found that companies need to speak a common language because some of the suggested ways to harness disruptive innovation are seemingly counterintuitive. If companies don’t have that common language, it is hard for them to come to consensus on a counterintuitive course of action. " - Clayton M. Christensen

" The Republicans are wrong in thinking that the rich create jobs. In reality, many of the richest Americans have been investing in efficiency innovations rather than to create jobs. And the Democrats are wrong, because growth won’t happen if they distribute the wealth of the wealthy to everyone else. " - Clayton M. Christensen

" For online universities, like Liverpool and the University of Phoenix, if prices drop by 60%, they still make money. But for the vast majority of traditional universities, if the prices fall by 10%, they are bankrupt; they have no wriggle room. " - Clayton M. Christensen

" We need to have a better balance between a deliberate strategy and staying open. Because in the end, most of us end up being successful in a career that we never imagined we would be in at the beginning. " - Clayton M. Christensen