Clayton M. Christensen

Professor

1952-04-06 – 2020-01-23

Clayton M. Christensen was an American academic and business consultant best known for developing the theory of disruptive innovation. He taught at Harvard Business School and authored influential works on innovation strategy. His ideas shaped management thinking across industries.

Quotes by Clayton M. Christensen

These are what Herzberg's research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.
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It is hard to overestimate the power of these motivators— the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful.
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We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it.
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We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it.
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It is hard to overestimate the power of these motivators— the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful.
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These are what Herzberg's research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.
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The dumb-manager theory of business problems just didn't hold water for me. There had to be a deeper reason why smart people would make decisions that lead to failure.
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Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.
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There are a lot of companies - not just Sony and Kodak - that have spent a lot of money trying to make the quality of the digital images comparable with film. But when you're sending these things over the Internet, they don't have to be high quality.
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A sustaining innovation makes better products that you can sell for better profits to your best customers.
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There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations.
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In a healthy economy, empowering, sustaining and efficiency innovations operate in balance. A healthy economy creates and sustains more jobs before squeezing out inefficiencies.
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When considering a career move, consider the most important assumptions that have to prove true and how you can swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid. Also, remain realistic about the path ahead of you.
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To focus capital and entrepreneurship into empowering innovation, we should change is the capital gains tax rate. We would be better served by a regressive tax rate, that would become progressively smaller the longer the investment is held.
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Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research.
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If we are to develop profound theory to solve the intractable problems in our societally-critical domains... we must learn to crawl into the life of what makes people tick.
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I have healed the sick by the power of the God. I have spoken with the gift of tongues.
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Disruption is continuously afoot in every industry, but especially in autos. It is how Toyota, Nissan and Honda bloodied Detroit: They did not start their attack with Lexus, Infiniti and Acura, but with low-end subcompact models branded Corona, Datsun and CVCC.
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A disruptive innovation is a technologically simple innovation in the form of a product, service, or business model that takes root in a tier of the market that is unattractive to the established leaders in an industry.
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Capitalists seem uninterested in capitalism, even as eager entrepreneurs can't get financing. Businesses and investors sound like the Ancient Mariner, who complained, 'Water, water everywhere - nor any drop to drink.'
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