Quotes from Clayton M. Christensen

If history is any guide, companies that keep disruptive technologies bottled up in their labs, working to improve them until they suit mainstream markets, will not be nearly as successful as firms that find markets that embrace the attributes of disruptive technologies as they initially stand.

Discovery-driven planning

They are always motivated to go up-market, and almost never motivated to defend the new or low-end markets that the disruptors find attractive. We call this phenomenon asymmetric motivation. It is the core of the innovator's dilemma, and the beginning of the innovator's solution.

innovator's dilemma: Should we invest to protect the least profitable end of our business, so that we can retain our least loyal, most price-sensitive customers? Or should we invest to strengthen our position in the most profitable tiers of our business, with customers who reward us with premium prices for better products?

I wonder what job arises in people's lives that causes them to come to this restaurant to 'hire' a milkshake?" That was an interesting way to think about the problem.

Given that aim, technology, as used in this book, means the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into products and services of greater value.

Excuse me. Can you help me understand what job you are trying to do with that milkshake?" When they'd struggle to answer this question, we'd help them by asking, "Well, think about the last time you were in this same situation, needing to get the same job done—but you didn't come here to hire that milkshake. What did you hire?" The answers were enlightening:

You'll see that without theory, we're at sea without a sextant.

There is no one right answer for all circumstances. You have to start by understanding the job the customer is trying to have done.

Professor Amar Bhide showed in his Origin and Evolution of New Business that 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.

your family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand your attention. They love you and they want to support your career, too. That can add up to neglecting the people you care about most in the world.

Every successful product or service, either explicitly or implicitly, was structured around a job to be done. Addressing a job is the causal mechanism behind a purchase. If someone develops a product that is interesting, but which doesn't intuitively map in customers' minds on a job that they are trying to do, that product will struggle to succeed—unless the product is adapted and repositioned on an important job.

Finding Happiness in Your Career The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. —Steve Jobs

The theory of good money, bad money explains that the clock of building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start. If you don't nurture and develop those relationships, they won't be there to support you if you find yourself traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.

If you work to understand what job you are being hired to do, both professionally and in your personal life, the payoff will be enormous.

one of the most important jobs you'll ever be hired to do is to be a spouse. Getting this right, I believe, is critical to sustaining a happy marriage.

What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

If we can't see beyond what's close by, we're relying on chance—on the currents of life—to guide us. Good theory helps people steer to good decisions—not just in business, but in life, too.

Yes, we can do all kinds of things for our spouse, but if we are not focused on the jobs she most needs doing, we will reap frustration and confusion in our search for happiness in that relationship.

The evidence summarized in this matrix may be of some use to venture capital investors, as a general way to frame the riskiness of proposed investments. It suggests that start-ups which propose to commercialize a breakthrough technology that is essentially sustaining in character have a far lower likelihood of success than start-ups whose vision is to use proven technology to disrupt an established industry with something that is simpler, more reliable, and more convenient.

you happy. Rather, the reverse is equally true: the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.

Thinking about your relationships from the perspective of the job to be done is the best way to understand what's important to the people who mean the most to you. It allows you to develop true empathy.

The past is a good predictor of the future only when conditions in the future resemble conditions in the past. And what works for a firm in one context might not work for another firm in a different context.

Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it's possible to love your job and hate it at the same time.