The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth QUOTES

1 " People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

2 " Disruptive innovations, in contrast, don’t attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. Rather, they disrupt and redefine that trajectory by introducing products and services that are not as good as currently available products. But disruptive technologies offer other benefits—typically, they are simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers.3 "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

3 " Necessity remains the mother of invention. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

4 " cost reductions meant survival, but not profitability, "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

5 " Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you’re good at. And "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

6 " Much of the ability to create and maintain valuable brands, as a consequence, has migrated away from the product and to the channel because, for the present, it is the channel that addresses the piece of added value that is not yet good enough. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

7 " Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

8 " the breakthrough researcher first discovers the fundamental causal mechanism behind the phenomena of success. This allows those who are looking for “an answer” to get beyond the wings-and-feathers mind-set of copying the attributes of successful companies. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

9 " Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

10 " Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success.12 Entrepreneurs rarely get their strategies exactly right the first time. The successful ones make it because they have money left over to try again after they learn that their initial strategy was flawed, whereas the failed ones typically have spent their resources implementing a deliberate strategy before its viability could be known. One of the most important roles of senior management during a venture’s early years is to learn from emergent sources what is working and what is not, and then to cycle that learning back into the process through the deliberate channel. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

11 " One of the most vexing dilemmas that stable corporations face when they seek to rekindle growth by launching new businesses is that their internal schools of experience have offered precious few courses in which managers could have learned how to launch new disruptive businesses. In many ways, the managers that corporate executives have come to trust the most because they have consistently delivered the needed results in the core businesses cannot be trusted to shepherd the creation of new growth. Human resources executives in this situation need to shoulder a major burden. They need to monitor where in the corporation’s schools of experience the needed courses might be created, and ensure that promising managers have the opportunity to be appropriately schooled before they are asked to take the helm of a new-growth business. When managers with the requisite education cannot be found internally, they need to ensure that the management team, as a balanced composite, has within it the requisite perspectives from the right schools of experience. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

12 " The larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to train employees at every level, acting autonomously, to make prioritization decisions that are consistent with the strategic direction and the business model of the company. That is why successful senior executives spend so much time articulating clear, consistent values that are broadly understood throughout the organization. Over time, a company’s values must evolve to conform to its cost structure or its income statement, because if the company is to survive, employees must prioritize those things that help the company to make money in the way that it is structured to make money. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

13 " To succeed predictably, disruptors must be good theorists. As they shape their growth business to be disruptive, they must align every critical process and decision to fit the disruptive circumstance. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

14 " the innovator’s dilemma: Should we invest to protect the least profitable end of our business, so that we can retain our least loyal, most price-sensitive customers? Or should we invest to strengthen our position in the most profitable tiers of our business, with customers who reward us with premium prices for better products? "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

15 " Probably the most daunting challenge in delivering growth is that if you fail once to deliver it, the odds that you ever will be able to deliver in the future are very low. This is the conclusion of a remarkable study, Stall Points, that the Corporate Strategy Board published in 1998.8 It examined the 172 companies that had spent time on Fortune’s list of the 50 largest companies between 1955 and 1995. Only 5 percent of these companies were able to sustain a real, inflation-adjusted growth rate of more than 6 percent across their entire tenure in this group. The other 95 percent reached a point at which their growth simply stalled, to rates at or below the rate of growth of the gross national product (GNP). Stalling is understandable, given our expectations that all growth markets become saturated and mature. What is scary is that of all these companies whose growth had stalled, only 4 percent were able to successfully reignite their growth even to a rate of 1 percent above GNP growth. Once growth had stalled, in other words, it proved nearly impossible to restart it. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

16 " Study after study, however, concludes that about 90 percent of all publicly traded companies have proved themselves unable to sustain for more than a few years a growth trajectory that creates above-average shareholder returns. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

17 " You need to define an opportunity that is disruptive relative to all the established players in the targeted market, or you should not invest in the idea. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

18 " Probably the most daunting challenge in delivering growth is that if you fail once to deliver it, the odds that you ever will be able to deliver in the future are very low. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

19 " Consider, for example, IBM’s decision to outsource the microprocessor for its PC business to Intel, and its operating system to Microsoft. IBM made these decisions in the early 1980s in order to focus on what it did best—designing, assembling, and marketing computer systems. Given its history, these choices made perfect sense. Component suppliers to IBM historically had lived a miserable, profit-free existence, and the business press widely praised IBM’s decision to out-source these components of its PC. It dramatically reduced the cost and time required for development and launch. And yet in the process of outsourcing what it did not perceive to be core to the new business, IBM put into business the two companies that subsequently captured most of the profit in the industry. How could IBM have known in advance that such a sensible decision would prove so costly? More broadly, how can any executive who is launching a new-growth business, as IBM was doing with its PC division in the early 1980s, know which value-added activities are those in which future competence needs to be mastered and kept inside? 2 "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

20 " when people encounter a significant threat, a response called “threat rigidity” sets in. The instinct of threat rigidity is to cease being flexible and to become “command and control” oriented—to focus everything on countering the threat in order to survive. "

― Clayton M. Christensen , The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth