Clayton Christensen Quotes

You either disrupt your own company or someone else will.

Technology is going to transform people's lives and society everywhere in the world. I spend most of my time studying new technologies. My main task is to understand what's going on and try to see where we can fit in.

Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.

History is littered with great firms that got killed by disruption. Of course, the personal computer, a technology that first took root as a toy, got Digital Equipment Corporation. Kodak missed the boat for a long time on digital imaging. Sony was slow to get MP3 technology. Microsoft doesn't know what to do with open source software. And so on.

Comparing Apple to Netflix is like comparing apples to oranges, especially if the oranges made so many mistakes that people stopped eating oranges and just went back to Blockbuster.

Learning how to understand how technology evolves, using tools like a Technology Road Map, is what you need more than anything to ride on top of the tsunami instead of being crushed by it.

Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.

If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong.

Any new technology tends to go through a 25-year adoption cycle.

Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.

There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do. Continually motivate employees so that they never get too complacent - see Yahoo, AOL and many other Internet companies for evidence of what happens when they do.

Change creates fear, and technology creates change. Sadly, most people don't behave very well when they are afraid.

High Tech is not merely a technical matter.

I would have thought technology would have made it harder to do what I did.

I literally worked at research labs where the staff really tried to steer management away from the modern technology that was actually better.

I am in a traditional financial services business - but we at Fidelity can see that the evolution of technology is setting our industry up for disruption. What if this technology could do for the transfer of value what the Internet did for the transfer of information?

It was very clear, if you grew up in the middle of Ireland, just how potent a force the Internet was and could be. I was always seduced by the potency of computers and the possibilities for which they could be leveraged.

Technology, through automation and artificial intelligence, is definitely one of the most disruptive sources.

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.

When a technology, regardless of how different and difficult it is, sustains the trajectory of performance improvement, my research asserts that the leaders in the prior generation of technology are likely to end up on top of their industry at the end of the transition.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

In fact, technology in, and of, itself does not cause particular kinds of change. It is, essentially, an enabling or facilitating agent. It makes possible new structures, new organizational and geographical arrangements of economic activities, new products and new processes, while not making particular, outcomes inevitable.

When you're certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool.

In entertainment, the technology began giving us greater choice and easier switching before almost any other area. The studios became much more dependent on the stars, not just star actors and directors but also star technicians, star cinematographers. It's a very important evolution in terms of understanding why people are working the way they're working.

If the technology is disruptive, on the other hand, the odds are that at the end of the transition, the leaders will have been toppled and new companies will be on top.