213 Quotes by Clayton Christensen

In my first career I had founded my own company, with a group of MIT professors, before coming to Harvard to finish my doctorate, and so I had a deep respect for the brains, talent, and dedication of managers. That made it hard for me to believe the attributions in the business press that stupid management was to blame. So I looked elsewhere for an explanation.

We need to have an understanding of what causes what to happen in the world, and why.

In most instances, biotechnology, though a radically different approach, is a sustaining technology: It's a dramatically improved way of targeting problems that we hadn't been able to solve with the conventional approach of mainstream pharmaceutical companies.

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.

If the theory accurately predicts what they [scientists] see, it confirms that it's a good theory. If they see something that the theory didn't lead them to believe, that's what Thomas Kuhn calls an anomaly. The anomaly requires a revised theory - and you just keep going through the cycle, making a better theory.

The transformation at the corporate level was achieved by selling off business units in old markets and by creating new business units to pursue the new opportunities. But the individual business units themselves within those transformed corporations were almost inert to change.

We all have jobs in our lives that we must get done. We reach out and bring products into our lives to get these jobs done. Marketing is all about asking, 'What job is the customer trying to accomplish?'

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

If you ask the average guy on the street to name five companies that have truly transformed themselves over the few decades, Hewlett-Packard would be on everybody's list. You'd also put on this list GE and Johnson & Johnson.