Top 55 Quotes by Clayton M. Christensen

The whole enterprise of teaching managers is steeped in the ethic of data-driven analytical support. The problem is, the data is only available about the past. So the way we've taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when it's too late.

The world is a nested space, and so we have our brain as a person, and people are members of teams, and teams are part of business units, and business units are parts of corporations, and corporations are part of industries, which are part of economies.

I wouldn't say there isn't a direct path to a successful career. There are people who knew exactly what they wanted to do from a very young age, weren't going to be diverted, and then they just went out and achieved it.

I helped start a ceramics company called CPS Technologies. We took it public in 1987 at $12 a share. Three months later, there was this horrible cliff: Black Monday. Fidelity had bought 15 percent of our stock, and their algorithm caused them to dump it all onto the market that day. We dropped from $12 to $2.