Clayton Christensen Quotes

You have to understand who your customer is and her motivations and marry it to what's happening in the outside world.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Products are sold because they solve a problem or fill a need. Understanding problems and needs involves understanding customers and what makes them tick.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

Marketing is the art of seeing (and then creating) what might be interesting to more than our friends

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 amount of meetings I've been in - people would be shocked. But that's how you gain experience, how you can gain knowledge, being in meetings and participating. You learn and grow.

The person who knows "how" will always have a job. The person who knows "why" will always be his boss

When Republicans went to college and studied business, they took a course in marketing and found out how people really think. Progressives need to take a lesson from that.

Empirical and observational data along with a healthy dash of intuition often have to be combined as business owners begin to look outward, not inward, at what solutions they can provide to their customers.

You don't need Math to do business reporting. Business is all about choices that consumers make.

Set aside a half hour or an hour to rethink the way you make decisions, the habits you have, the biases you may have. And if you think of things, if you come with a little bit of a blank slate and be willing to acknowledge what you don't know, and you'd be willing to think like a child, I think it'll help not only individuals but society at large.

As a teenager, my dad taught me about the idea of unintended consequences, and I've had the experience, and how to deal with it, pounded into my soul over the years.

The top principle for disruptive and sustaining innovation is that it has to have a laser focus on customers. Innovation begins with their needs and expectations.

If you focus on what people care about, you have ideas. And people are looking for solutions.

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It's understanding who to listen to and why.

All through my life, when faced with a difficult decision, I always ask myself - where can I learn more. Make the choice to learn.

Business is all about the customer: what the customer wants and what they get. Generally, every customer wants a product or service that solves their problem, worth their money, and is delivered with amazing customer service.

You really need a unique selling proposition, and people need to care about that unique selling proposition.

Usually, what I recommend to entrepreneurs is to focus on telling the problem first, about the customer or the person who has that problem.

Always make the choice to learn. What Princeton taught me was whatever mess you are studying, pull a thread with great persistence 'til you have clarity of thought. Princeton taught me how to solve a problem. How to think - that's what we pull out of this place.

The primary goal of IoT is to solve business problems, not to deliver a cool project or new technology. Focus on a business-relevant problem, and work with your customer to solve it.

As an entrepreneur, I've learned how crucial it is to be able to call a spade a spade and avoid falling in love with a particular strategy or product. Instead, you need to let the customer tell you what she needs - and to change her as she changes.

Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.