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
There are other dimensions of biotechnology. If you think of biotechnology like the Internet, it's not a category - it's an infrastructure that can be deployed to sustain or disrupt. In health care, the most complex problems at the high end have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode by the best, most experienced physicians you can find.
Businesses want to think in terms of categories. Consumers want us to think in terms of their needs.
Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That's not management, that's deal making. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession
Innovation simply isn't as unpredictable as many people think. There isn't a cookbook yet, but we're getting there.
Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at.
I've concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn't dollars, but the individual people whose lives I've touched. I think that's the way it will work for us all. Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.
The parents of teenagers would love to have a car that won't go very far or go very fast. They could just cruise around the neighborhood, drive it to school, see their friends, plug it in overnight.
When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.
When the functionality of a product or service overshoots what customers can use, it changes the way companies have to compete. When the product isn't yet good enough, the way you compete is by making better products. In order to make better products, the architecture of the product has to be interdependent and proprietary in character.
Year after year after year, people write books about managing innovation or about leadership, for example, without ever going through the pain of saying, "This kind of leadership will cause this result in these circumstances and a very different result in those circumstances." This is academic malpractice of the worst kind.
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.
I was lucky enough to build on the work of a number of people who had already run laps around this theory-building track. The original classification scheme, years ago, distinguished radical from incremental change. The theory said that established firms managed incremental change well, but would be expected to founder when their industry encountered a radical change.
Disruptive technology is a theory. It says this will happen and this is why; it's a statement of cause and effect. In our teaching we have so exalted the virtues of data-driven decision making that in many ways we condemn managers only to be able to take action after the data is clear and the game is over. In many ways a good theory is more accurate than data. It allows you to see into the future more clearly.