Clayton Christensen Quotes

Franchises need to evolve or die.

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise.

In any business, you have to evolve.

It's very difficult in the technology space when you have been leapfrogged to prosper again.

No company can afford not to move forward. It may be at the top of the heap today but at the bottom of the heap tomorrow, if it doesn't.

When you're a large company with significant market share, it's tempting to view market disruptions as a threat, but we view them as an opportunity.

Since I became CEO, 87 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 are off the list. What that says is that companies that don't reinvent themselves will be left behind. I also think that's true of people. And I think it's true of countries.

You either innovate or you become defunct.

You've got to keep reinventing. You'll have new competitors. You'll have new customers all around you.

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

We started Kotter International to improve leaders' ability to deal with big, important transformations in organizations - and in their lives.

Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don't believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you're likely to have issues.

From a product development perspective, choosing whether a technology is disruptive at a potential moment is key.

As an owner, you have a choice. Do you want to adopt a vision that you think is real sharp and real cutting edge and could get you from good to great - has a chance - or do you want to just say the organization is not about that, and we're not going to try to adopt a new coaching philosophy and vision.

You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.

If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.

Whatever business you're in - it doesn't matter - it's going to commoditize over time. It's going to devalue. You've got to keep moving it to a higher value.

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.

In a competitive industry, only paranoid incumbents - those constantly striving for betterment - have any hope of surviving.

To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection.

If one sees far, structural changes that come with temporary disruptions can be growth- and efficiency-augmenting in the medium to long term.

Business comes and goes and we make a strategic decision that could lead you to whole new place.

For every company that sees the value of their capital go up, there's another company that has been disrupted, and the value of their capital gets marked down because it's not going to compete in the same way.