289 Quotes by Clayton M. Christensen

You can’t find returns in investments you haven’t made.

None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.

There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.

Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.

Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success.

There are whole industries, such as venture capital, that are currently organized around the belief that innovation is essentially a game of playing the odds. But it’s time to topple that tired paradigm. I’ve spent twenty years gathering evidence so that you can put your time, energy, and resources into creating products and services that you can predict, in advance, customers will be eager to hire. Leave relying on luck to the other guys.

Its actually really important that you succeed at what youre succeeding at, but that isnt going to be the measure of your life.

Breaking an old business model is always going to require leaders to follow their instinct. There will always be persuasive reasons not to take a risk. But if you only do what worked in the past, you will wake up one day and find that you’ve been passed by.

I’ve concluded that getting the categories right is an absolutely crucial step to building useful management theory, and unfortunately too few writers do this. You’ve got to engage in serious scholarship, and then figure out how to write it in a way that lots of people can understand.