Quotes from Clayton M. Christensen

The only way all people can have the opportunity to choose or reject the gospel of Jesus Christ is for us, without judgment, to invite them to follow the Savior.

The iPod is a proprietary integrated product, although that is becoming quite modular. You can download your music from Amazon as easily as you can from iTunes. You also see modularity organized around the Android operating system that is growing much faster than the iPhone. So I worry that modularity will do its work on Apple.

The whole enterprise of teaching managers is steeped in the ethic of data-driven analytical support. The problem is, the data is only available about the past. So the way we've taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when it's too late.

I haven't met too many people that don't intend to have a fulfilling life. High-achievers, however, end up allocating their resources in a way that seriously undermines their intended strategy.

Funding that is focused on the ability to diagnose diseases precisely will just have inestimable value because that's the gate through which precision medicine has to go. Unless you can diagnose the disease precisely, care has to remain in the hands of expensive institutions and expensive caregivers.

When a company identifies how to integrate the processes needed to give the consumer a sense of job completion, it can blow away the competition. A product is easy to copy, but experiences are very hard to replicate.

Every city and town in America would be bankrupt if they kept their books the way private-sector companies keep their books - because of the obligation cities and towns have taken upon themselves to provide health care for their retirees.

Disruption is continuously afoot in every industry, but especially in autos. It is how Toyota, Nissan and Honda bloodied Detroit: They did not start their attack with Lexus, Infiniti and Acura, but with low-end subcompact models branded Corona, Datsun and CVCC.

People don't actually want to think about their own health and don't take action until they are sick. Yet employers are very motivated to get their employees healthy, since they bear most of the burden of their health care costs.

Holiday Inn comes in at the bottom of the market, but they can't go upmarket except if they emulate the Four Seasons. So they can go up, but they have to emulate the people they're trying to compete against. They can't disrupt them, because there isn't anything about their model that is extendable upmarket.

An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.

One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend.

If you make that decision, that you'll always follow that rule, then your commitment to do it sinks into your heart, and when you realize the benefits of having integrity time after time, it really changes your heart, not just your head.

The basic idea that marketing is wrong at its core is one of the main reasons why innovation seems blocked and unpredictable.

Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.

Empowering innovations transform something that is complicated and expensive into something that is so much more simple and affordable that a much larger population can enjoy it.

There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.

The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations.

Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently, the world is awash in capital, but the innovations we need to advance aren't there.

By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body.

People have an idol they want to be like and try to follow what the idols did. But when you do, you find out you're not very successful and you're not very happy. You try to copy these models, and it doesn't yield successful results.

Efficiency innovations provide return on investment in 12-18 months. Empowering innovations take 5-10 years to yield a return. We have ample capital - oceans of capital - that is being reinvested into efficiency innovation.

I wouldn't say there isn't a direct path to a successful career. There are people who knew exactly what they wanted to do from a very young age, weren't going to be diverted, and then they just went out and achieved it.

Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.