Quotes from Clayton M. Christensen

Indomie noodles represent the process by which poverty, through innovation, can become prosperity.

Just Because You Have Feathers …

Often even more perplexing, however, is when these problems arise within the mind of the same person: when the right decision for the long term makes no sense for the short term;

Data is not the phenomenon. It represents the phenomenon, but not very well.

If your family matters most to you, when you think about all the choices you've made with your time in a week, does your family seem to come out on top? Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you'll never become that person.

The only way to avoid the consequences of uncomfortable moral concessions in your life is to never start making them in the first place. When the first step down that path presents itself, turn around and walk the other way.

These three parts—likeness, commitment, and metrics—comprise a company's purpose. Companies that aspire to positive impact must never leave their purpose to chance. Worthy purposes rarely emerge inadvertently; the world is too full of mirage, paradox, and uncertainty to leave this to fate. Purpose must be deliberately conceived and chosen, and then pursued.

The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg. As a parent, you will try many things with your child that simply won't work. When this happens, it can be very easy to view it as a failure. Don't. If anything, it's the opposite.

The danger for high-achieving people is that they'll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments.

But this book is not about companies with such weaknesses: It is about well-managed companies that have their competitive antennae up, listen astutely to their customers, invest aggressively in new technologies, and yet still lose market dominance.

When the organization's capabilities reside primarily in its people, changing capabilities to address the new problems is relatively simple. But when the capabilities have come to reside in processes and values, and especially when they have become embedded in culture, change can be extraordinarily difficult.

if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you're not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won't hate it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn't job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.

Coping with the relentless onslaught of technology change was akin to trying to climb a mudslide raging down a hill. You have to scramble with everything you've got to stay on top of it, and if you ever once stop to catch your breath, you get buried.

You can talk all you want about having a strategy for your life, understanding motivation, and balancing aspirations with unanticipated opportunities. But ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those with where you actually expend your time, money, and energy.

When a measurable trajectory of improvement has been established, determining whether a new technology is likely to improve a product's performance relative to earlier products is an unambiguous question.

As you're living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you're heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they're not supporting the strategy you've decided upon, then you're not implementing that strategy at all.

three simple questions beside those theories: How can I be sure that I will be successful and happy in my career? My relationships with my spouse, my children, and my extended family and close friends become an enduring source of happiness? I live a life of integrity—and stay out of jail?

The choice of the word "progress" is deliberate. It represents movement toward a goal or aspiration.

It's no surprise, really. Processes are often hard to see—they're a combination of both formal, defined, and documented steps and expectations and informal, habitual routines or ways of working that have evolved over time. But they matter profoundly. 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.

the path to happiness in a relationship is not just about finding someone who you think is going to make 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.

The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward.

Put simply, innovative thinkers connect fields, problems, or ideas that others find unrelated.

The fear of cannibalizing sales of existing products is often cited as a reason why established firms delay the introduction of new technologies.

Innovation, in a very real sense, exists in a "pre–quality revolution" state.1 Managers accept flaws, missteps, and failure as an inevitable part of the process of innovation. They have become so accustomed to putting Band-Aids on their uneven innovation success that too often they give no real thought to what's causing it in the first place.