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
We all have jobs in our lives that we must get done. We reach out and bring products into our lives to get these jobs done. Marketing is all about asking, 'What job is the customer trying to accomplish?'
Holiday Inn comes in at the bottom of the market, but they can't go upmarket except if they emulate the Four Seasons. So they can go up, but they have to emulate the people they're trying to compete against. They can't disrupt them, because there isn't anything about their model that is extendable upmarket.
'Disruption' is, at its core, a really powerful idea. Everyone hijacks the idea to do whatever they want now. It's the same way people hijacked the word 'paradigm' to justify lame things they're trying to sell to mankind.
There are companies trying to build business within Saudi Arabia, and what they find is that if they try to bring on locals and teach them how to become senior executives, they just don't show up to work. They are not predictable as to when they'll come in and how much of their hearts are into that opportunity.
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.
People in private equity complain that they have so much capital and so few places to invest. But you have lots of entrepreneurs trying to raise money at the low end and find that they can't get funding because of this mismatch. I think that there is an opportunity there.
If you develop a product that gets what the customer is trying to get done, you don't have to advertise; people will just pull it into their lives.
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.
People under-invest in family because it doesn't pay off until the long term.
People don't actually want to think about their own health and don't take action until they are sick. Yet employers are very motivated to get their employees healthy, since they bear most of the burden of their health care costs.