213 Quotes by Clayton Christensen

The path I am trying so hard to follow is in fact the one that God my Father and His Son Jesus Christ want me to pursue. It has brought me deep happiness.

To prop up the stock price, managers have to turn down the screws on everybody. That forces them to cancel all the projects that would lead to future growth in order to drop money to the bottom line. This is HP's dilemma today. Once a company's growth has stopped, the game as we have known it is over. It's a scary thing.

We have found that companies need to speak a common language because some of the suggested ways to harness disruptive innovation are seemingly counterintuitive. If companies don't have that common language, it is hard for them to come to consensus on a counterintuitive course of action.

You can invest to create the new growth business while the core business is still growing, because new business units don't need to get big fast. But when the core business stops growing, investing to create new growth businesses becomes impossible.

The parents of teenagers would love to have a car that won't go very far or go very fast. They could just cruise around the neighborhood, drive it to school, see their friends, plug it in overnight.

How could Digital's collapse be so precipitous? It's because, in many ways, financial performance data is misleading. As you move up to the top of the market, you're getting rid of the less profitable products at the low end and adding business with more attractive margins at the high end. The rate of unit volume growth might be tapering off as you pursue these smaller markets, but your margins actually look better. So Wall Street rewards your stock price until you hit the ceiling.

When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.

In a large successful company where your power base as CEO isn't all that secure, it's hard for a CEO to pursue a truly disruptive strategy.

Finding a 'sacrificial lamb' on whom to tag blame for complicated problems is an important instrument in the toolkit of politicians, because it deflects blame for the nation's economic woes away from their own regulatory lapses, economic mismanagement and coddling to labor unions.