Quotes from Clayton M. Christensen

In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder.

Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of "just this once.

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 metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.

Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.

There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.

Disruptive technologies typically enable new markets to emerge.

Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.

I don't view it as mystic. I believe that God is our father. He created us. He is powerful because he knows everything. Therefore everything I learn that is true makes me more like my father in heaven. When science seems to contradict religion, then one, the other, or both are wrong, or incomplete. Truth is not incompatible with itself. When I benefit from science it's actually not correct for me to say it resulted from science and not from God. They work in concert.

In fact, how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.

The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.

disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.

In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge.

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don't want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain

Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don't even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.

First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms' most profitable customers generally don't want, and indeed initially can't use, products based on disruptive technologies.

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.

We are awash in content that needs to be taught, yet the vast majority of colleges give a large portion of their faculties' salaries to fund research.

The mistake that makes launching a venture expensive is when you try to make a disruptive technology so good that it can compete on a quality basis with an established product.

The dumb-manager theory of business problems just didn't hold water for me. There had to be a deeper reason why smart people would make decisions that lead to failure.

Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea.

Most people have never thought through how they're going to allocate their time. You need to make a decision in advance.

To become the kind of person you want to become, you've got to have discipline. It's easier to keep to your standards 100 percent of the time versus 98 percent of the time.