Quotes from Clayton M. Christensen

Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What's important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off.

What has to prove true for this to work?

It is important to address hygiene factors such as a safe and comfortable working environment, relationship with managers and colleagues, enough money to look after your family—if you don't have these things, you'll experience dissatisfaction with your work. But these alone won't do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it.

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, then you don't know what you are doing.

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

Each of us may have a different process for committing to our likeness. But what is universal is that your intent must be to answer this question: who do I truly want to become?

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. Those

It is very difficult for a company whose cost structure is tailored to compete in high-end markets to be profitable in low-end markets as well.

When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we "fire" it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.

Children need to do more than learn new skills. The theory of capabilities suggests they need to be challenged. They need to solve hard problems. They need to develop values. When you find yourself providing more and more experiences that are not giving children an opportunity to be deeply engaged, you are not equipping them with the processes they need to succeed in the future.

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. In other words, how you allocate resources is where the rubber meets the road.

The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn't job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.

As such, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that anyone can offer you. The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.

Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, rather than what those customers really need. What's missing is empathy: a deep understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve.

For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress.

Keeping high-volume procedures within general hospitals allows hospitals to subsidize the unique, low-volume specialized capabilities that are so central to the value proposition of their solution shops- being able to diagnose and embark on a therapy for anything that might be wrong.

It's impossible to have a meaningful conversation about happiness without understanding what makes each of us tick. When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers—and even unhappy lives—it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us.

Creating the right experiences and then integrating around them to solve a job, is critical for competitive advantage. That's because while it may be easy for competitors to copy products, it's difficult for them to copy experiences that are well integrated into your company's processes. But to do all this well takes a holistic

Robert B. Barr and John Tagg, "From Teaching to Learning—A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education," Change

People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this…is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror-because data is only available about the past.

To understand a company's strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.

Notwithstanding the intense pressure on faculty members to publish, nationwide surveys indicate that they value teaching as highly as scholarly research.6 For every research superstar seeking international acclaim and association only with graduate students, there are many professors who value not only scholarship but also teaching and mentoring undergraduates.

the breakthrough researcher first discovers the fundamental causal mechanism behind the phenomena of success. This allows those who are looking for "an answer" to get beyond the wings-and-feathers mind-set of copying the attributes of successful companies.

Given that 93 percent of companies that ended up being successful had to change their initial strategy, any capital that demands that the early company become very big, very fast, will almost always drive the business off a cliff instead. A big company will burn through money much faster, and a big organization is much harder to change than a small one.