Clayton M. Christensen > Quotes

“It's easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. —Steve Jobs”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”
― Clayton Christensen

“In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“I used to think that if you cared for other people, you need to study sociology or something like it. But….I [have] concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”
― Clayton M. Christensen

“the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?: A thought-provoking approach to measuring life's success

“In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma with Award-Winning Harvard Business Review Article ?How Will You Measure Your Life??

“As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me—but rather from what they didn’t do for me. One such example: my mother never mended my clothes. I remember going to her when I was in the early grades of elementary school, with holes in both socks of my favorite pair. My mom had just had her sixth child and was deeply involved in our church activities. She was very, very busy. Our family had no extra money anywhere, so buying new socks was just out of the question. So she told me to go string thread through a needle, and to come back when I had done it. That accomplished—it took me about ten minutes, whereas I’m sure she could have done it in ten seconds—she took one of the socks and showed me how to run the needle in and out around the periphery of the hole, rather than back and forth across the hole, and then simply to draw the hole closed. This took her about thirty seconds. Finally, she showed me how to cut and knot the thread. She then handed me the second sock, and went on her way. A year or so later—I probably was in third grade—I fell down on the playground at school and ripped my Levi’s. This was serious, because I had the standard family ration of two pairs of school trousers. So I took them to my mom and asked if she could repair them. She showed me how to set up and operate her sewing machine, including switching it to a zigzag stitch; gave me an idea or two about how she might try to repair it if it were she who was going to do the repair, and then went on her way. I sat there clueless at first, but eventually figured it out. Although in retrospect these were very simple things, they represent a defining point in my life. They helped me to learn that I should solve my own problems whenever possible; they gave me the confidence that I could solve my own problems; and they helped me experience pride in that achievement. It’s funny, but every time I put those socks on until they were threadbare, I looked at that repair in the toe and thought, “I did that.” I have no memory now of what the repair to the knee of those Levi’s looked like, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. When I looked at it, however, it didn’t occur to me that I might not have done a perfect mending job. I only felt pride that I had done it. As for my mom, I have wondered what”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

“Disruptive technologies typically enable new markets to emerge.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

“Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?: A thought-provoking approach to measuring life's success

“The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit. These are the reasons why great firms stumbled or failed when confronted with disruptive technological change.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“I don't view it as mystic. I believe that God is our father. He created us. He is powerful because he knows everything. Therefore everything I learn that is true makes me more like my father in heaven. When science seems to contradict religion, then one, the other, or both are wrong, or incomplete. Truth is not incompatible with itself. When I benefit from science it's actually not correct for me to say it resulted from science and not from God. They work in concert.”
― Clayton M. Christensen

“Indeed, while experiences and information can be good teachers, there are many times in life where we simply cannot afford to learn on the job. You don’t want to have to go through multiple marriages to learn how to be a good spouse. Or wait until your last child has grown to master parenthood. This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“resisting the temptation whose logic was “In this extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK” has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.

The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.”
― Clayton M. Christensen

“disruptive technology should be framed as a marketing challenge, not a technological one.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

“In fact, how you allocate your own resources can make your life turn out to be exactly as you hope or very different from what you intend.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“The hot water that softens a carrot will harden an egg.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?: A thought-provoking approach to measuring life's success

“the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?: A thought-provoking approach to measuring life's success

“successful companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach. Most of those that fail, in contrast, spend all their money on their original strategy—which is usually wrong. The”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?: A thought-provoking approach to measuring life's success

“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.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?