Clayton Christensen Quotes

Visionary CEOs are not 'just' great at assuring world-class execution of a tested and successful business model: they are also world-class innovators.

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.

The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.

The height of success is when you break your business, that is what I say! Just when you think things are really, really going well, that's the time to change.

The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.

Audiences are shifting. Platforms are shifting. Ages are shifting. It's better to be in charge of change than to have to react to change.

Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

The move to modernity has its risks but the greater risk is not moving at all.

What I learned with tech companies is I gotta give people room to experiment, and also what might later on be a mistake.

Leaders must go ahead even when moving ahead is controversial. You must be ahead of time, because if you want to represent the status quo, what do you need leaders for?

Any of our businesses will not exist in the form that is today, will not exist in the same form one year later, two years later... We have to worry about the disruptions in the business models and the practices.

We built our business on creativity, and we're going to have to go through an education process for the next five years to explain to people how our users and that creativity creates value.

Great founders live for chaotic moments.

As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I aim to be the disrupter in chief; I want to challenge those who aim to block change, stop development and restrict success. I want to challenge the caution that strangles risk-takers and go-getters.

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

The Higher Education Industry is very analogous to the Newspaper industry. By the time they realize they need to change the costs to support their legacy infrastructure and costs will keep them from getting there.

Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred in a business - in demographics, in values, in technology or science - and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires something that is most difficult for existing companies to do: to abandon rather than defend yesterday.

The great task of statesmanship is to apply past lessons to new situations, to draw correct analogies to understand and act upon present forces, to recognise the need for change.

A person who refuses to risk change fails to grow.

The more successful enterprises are the more they try to replicate, duplicate, codify what makes us great. And suddenly they're inward thinking. They're thinking how can we continue to do what we've done in the past without understanding that what made them successful is to take risks, to change and to adapt and to be responsive. And so in a sense success breeds its own failure. And I think it's true of a lot of successful businesses.

If you never take a risk, you will never know what changes you need to make.

At least at first, the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you'll never begin.

I decided this early on at Justice: if the traditional way was the most effective way of doing something, then we'd maintain it. But if it was not functioning at optimum levels, we would be doing the country a disservice by continuing to do things "like we've always done them."