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Clayton Christensen Quotes

Professor

Clayton M. Christensen is an esteemed professor known for his contributions to the fields of business management and innovation. Born on April 6, 1952, he is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of 'The Innovator's Dilemma'.

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Famous Clayton Christensen Quotes

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

Careers Path Successful Direct Plenty Indirect Successful Career

Author:Clayton Christensen

“Often they [writers on the study of management] have a point of view based upon intuition and experience. They then offer a cadence of two-paragraph examples carefully selected to "prove" their theory, and then they write "one size fits all" books. The message is, "If you'd do what these companies did, you'd be successful too."”

“It is when the product is not good enough that proprietary integration gives you a competitive edge. You cannot outsource and be competitively successful in this situation. But at the other end, where standard components assembled in standard ways can yield acceptable performance, you must outsource.”

Way Giving Ends Enough Situation Successful Products Standards Performances Edges Yield Good Enough Acceptable Integration Components Not Good Enough

Author:Clayton Christensen

“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.”

Hard Company Successful Strategy Pursue Secure Ceo Disruptive Successful Company

Author:Clayton Christensen

“In general, the questions that are on our mind are the same questions that have been driving our work over the past decade. How do we bring order to this messy, unpredictable world of innovation? How can we dramatically improve the chances of creating a successful new-growth business? How can we do this again and again? More specifically, it has become very clear that the fundamental paradigms of market segmentation and branding are badly broken - and we're working on developing more useful theories for these dimensions of innovation.”

World Mind Past Chance Successful Broken Innovation Driving Branding Unpredictable Messy Paradigm Over The Past

Author:Clayton Christensen

“Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.”

Motivation Successful Growing Innovation Ingredients

Book:Disrupting Class, Expanded Edition: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

Source: Disrupting Class, Expanded Edition: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

“Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something and it doesn't work and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet. Ultimately you become commercially successful.”

Trying Firsts Successful Havens First Time Innovation

Author:Clayton Christensen