Clayton Christensen
Clayton Christensen
Clayton M. Christensenis an American scholar, educator, author, business consultant, and religious leader who currently serves as the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, having a joint appointment in the Technology & Operations Management and General Management faculty groups. He is best known for his study of innovation in commercial enterprises. His first book, The Innovator's Dilemma, articulated his theory of disruptive innovation. Christensen is also a co-founder of Rose Park Advisors, a venture...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth6 April 1952
CountryUnited States of America
People have an idol they want to be like and try to follow what the idols did. But when you do, you find out you're not very successful and you're not very happy. You try to copy these models, and it doesn't yield successful results.
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.
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.
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.
There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.
Motivation is the catalyzing ingredient for every successful innovation. The same is true for learning.
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.
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."
If you're successful and growing, you can manage any way you want to. Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.
The principles of disruptive innovation are indeed intended to be guidelines to assist managers both in introducing disruptive innovations as well as identifying disruptive developments in their market.
The way I ought to measure my life is in terms of the others I helped to become better and happier people. That's the biggest thing to think about if you're not happy.
Empowering innovations transform something that is complicated and expensive into something that is so much more simple and affordable that a much larger population can enjoy it.
Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently, the world is awash in capital, but the innovations we need to advance aren't there.
People who have the drive to achieve spend most of their time on what brings them the most tangible, immediate sense of success. Investments in our family only pay off in the very long term.