Quotes from Clayton M. Christensen

Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you.

As MIT's Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization.1 They enforce "this is what matters most to us." Processes are intangible; they belong

railroads fell into the trap of letting the product define the market they were in, rather than the job customers were hiring them to do. They

Principle #1: Companies Depend on Customers and Investors for Resources

As MIT's Edgar Schein has explored and discussed, processes are a critical part of the unspoken culture of an organization.1 They enforce "this is what matters most to us.

In the early stage, managers are puzzle solvers, not number crunchers. Passive

Adopting new technologies can improve the way we solve Jobs to Be Done. But what's important is that you focus on understanding the underlying job, not falling in love with your solution for it.

when people encounter a significant threat, a response called "threat rigidity" sets in. The instinct of threat rigidity is to cease being flexible and to become "command and control" oriented—to focus everything on countering the threat in order to survive.

This is what processes aligned with customer jobs do: they shift complexity and nuisances from the customer to the vendor, leaving positive customer experiences and valuable progress in their place.

Through a jobs lens, what matters more than who reports to whom is how different parts of the organization interact to systematically deliver the offering that perfectly performs customers' Jobs to Be Done. When managers are focused on the customer's Job to Be Done, they not only have a very clear compass heading for their innovation efforts but they also have a vital organizing principle for their internal structure.

Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed: Suppliers and customers must discover them together.

What would the cost of [a] hamburger at TGI Fridays be if, instead of paying for the outcome of good food delivered in a congenial location by friendly service, we actually just paid for the number of cooks . . . and how many wait staff that went by . . . What would happen to the price of a hamburger?

What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?" List them. Are they within your control? Equally important, ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating. Are you basing your position on extrinsic or intrinsic motivators? Why do you think this is going to be something you enjoy doing? What evidence do you have?

As Medicare, Medicaid, and private health assistance companies pervasively inserted themselves between patients and providers, the market ultimately evolved toward what economists call monopsony—where a few huge, powerful buyers essentially determine the prices they will pay to their more fragmented suppliers.

The most calamitous failures of prediction usually have a lot in common. We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is.

Processes and values define how resources—many of which can be bought and sold, hired and fired—are combined to create value.

When disruptive change appears on the horizon, managers need to assemble the capabilities to confront the change before it has affected the mainstream business. In other words, they need an organization that is geared toward the new challenge before the old one, whose processes are tuned to the existing business model, has reached a crisis that demands fundamental change.

business. One particularly common one is RONA, or Return on Net Assets. In manufacturing businesses, this is calculated by dividing a company's income by its net assets. Hence, a company can be judged as being more profitable either by adding income to the numerator, or by reducing the assets in the denominator. Driving the numerator up is harder, because it entails selling more products. Driving the denominator down is often easier—because you can just opt to outsource.

The circumstance is fundamental to defining the job (and finding a solution for it), because the nature of the progress desired will always be strongly influenced by the circumstance.

children will learn when they are ready to learn, not when we're ready to teach them.

Managers whose organizations are confronting change must first determine that they have the resources required to succeed. They then need to ask a separate question: does the organization have the processes and values to succeed?

Children will learn when they're ready to learn, not when you're ready to teach them; if you are not with them as they encounter challenges in their lives, then you are missing important opportunities to shape their priorities—and their lives.

As a consequence, the larger and more successful an organization becomes, the weaker the argument that emerging markets can remain useful engines for growth.

Walkman cassette player was temporarily put on hold when market research indicated that consumers would never buy a tape player that didn't have the capacity to record and that customers would be irritated by the use of earphones. But Morita ignored his marketing department's warning, trusting his own gut instead. The Walkman went on to sell over 330 million units and created a worldwide culture of personal music devices.