The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.
Clayton M. Christensen
Diabetes is a great example whereby, giving the patient the tools, you can manage yourself very well.
The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.
There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.
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.
Understanding motivation is one of the most important things we can do in our lives, because it has such a bearing on why we do the things we do and whether we enjoy them or not.
Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.
Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.
The single most important factor in our long-term happiness is the relationships we have with our family and close friends.
You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care.
Almost always, great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before.
Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.
The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations.
When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.
'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.
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.
An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.
Children are ready to learn when they are ready to learn, not necessarily when their parents are ready to teach them.
Growth makes management easier. In particular, it makes making labor concessions seem easy. It's when growth stops because you're being disrupted that managing becomes really, really hard, and as a result, most disrupted companies simply disappear.
American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.
Finding a 'sacrificial lamb' on whom to tag blame for complicated problems is an important instrument in the toolkit of politicians, because it deflects blame for the nation's economic woes away from their own regulatory lapses, economic mismanagement and coddling to labor unions.
I got Type 1 diabetes at 30. It hit me in 1982 when I was a White House Fellow in Washington. I had viral pneumonia. I lost 35 pounds in six weeks. And I couldn't see anything. Everything was blurry. I was always thirsty.
Every city and town in America would be bankrupt if they kept their books the way private-sector companies keep their books - because of the obligation cities and towns have taken upon themselves to provide health care for their retirees.
The iPod is a proprietary integrated product, although that is becoming quite modular. You can download your music from Amazon as easily as you can from iTunes. You also see modularity organized around the Android operating system that is growing much faster than the iPhone. So I worry that modularity will do its work on Apple.
This is why I belong, and why I believe. I commend to all this same search for happiness and for the truth.
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.
Managers are already voracious consumers of theory. Every time they make a decision or take action, it's based on some theory that leads them to believe that action will lead to the right result. The problem is, most managers aren't aware of the theories they're using, and they often use the wrong theories for the situation.
The key is not to figure out what the best people are doing and try to emulate it - rather, figure out what causes people and companies to be successful.
Things happen to us in unpredictable ways, but the effect that that has on the kind of people who we become actually is not only open to chance - we can influence it in pretty profound ways.
Venture capital is always wanting to go up market.
I wrote my first piece about the disruption of the Harvard Business School in 1999. Because you could see this coming. I haven't yet done the one about the disruption of the Stanford Business School.
By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body.
Most marketers think there's a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don't exist.
The first two lessons, which we learned early in our efforts to be good member missionaries, have made sharing the Gospel much easier: We simply can't predict who will or won't be interested in the Gospel, and building a friendship is not a prerequisite to inviting people to learn about the Gospel.
Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.
There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.
In organizations, once you articulate how success will be measured, everybody tries to game the system so that they are measured in the best possible way.
As a general rule, if you have a product that doesn't get the job done that a customer is needing to get done, then often you have to offer it for zero. Because if you ask for money for it - because if it doesn't do the job well, they won't pay for it.
The ability to share the gospel isn't a 'gift' that has been given to only a few Latter-day Saints and denied to the rest.
To become the kind of person you want to become, you've got to have discipline. It's easier to keep to your standards 100 percent of the time versus 98 percent of the time.
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.
I'm an optimistic person.
There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations.
I'd been raised Mormon, but there comes a time where you are not following what you've been taught, but discovering for yourself if it's true.
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.
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.
In the scriptures, we are told you can't really understand happiness unless you understand sadness. You don't know pleasure if you don't know pain. It's part of life. So can you learn something from somebody who has gone from success to success to success? I don't think so.
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.
Because we employ no professional preachers, it means that every sermon or lesson in church is given by a regular member - women and men, children and grandparents.
No idea for a new growth business ever comes fully shaped. When it emerges, it's half-baked, and it then goes through a process of becoming fully shaped.
