Quotes from Clayton M. Christensen

The world is a nested space, and so we have our brain as a person, and people are members of teams, and teams are part of business units, and business units are parts of corporations, and corporations are part of industries, which are part of economies.

Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research.

In the universities, we teach you what we decide you need to know. And the employers find out when they hire people that students didn't learn what we needed them to learn. Online learning offerings, like the University of Phoenix, have relationships with employers and teach what you need to know.

I wrote my first piece about the disruption of the Harvard Business School in 1999. Because you could see this coming. I haven't yet done the one about the disruption of the Stanford Business School.

American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.

Things happen to us in unpredictable ways, but the effect that that has on the kind of people who we become actually is not only open to chance - we can influence it in pretty profound ways.

By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption.

Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.

If you're successful and growing, you can manage any way you want to. Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.

Growth makes management easier. In particular, it makes making labor concessions seem easy. It's when growth stops because you're being disrupted that managing becomes really, really hard, and as a result, most disrupted companies simply disappear.

When considering a career move, consider the most important assumptions that have to prove true and how you can swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid. Also, remain realistic about the path ahead of you.

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.

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.

Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.

I'm an optimistic person.

Most marketers think there's a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don't exist.

The way I ought to measure my life is in terms of the others I helped to become better and happier people. That's the biggest thing to think about if you're not happy.

It's easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.

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

Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.

In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? 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. That's a dangerous way to build a strategy.

You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.

If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.

I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey.