Clayton Christensen Quotes

Best way to succeed is to do things for the customer, not to the competition. Very few people buy a product in order to help you hurt the competition. To think otherwise is lunacy.

One of the things which make any company successful, in particular the Home Depot, was that we understood and catered to the customer. If it didn't sell, it didn't make a difference what we thought or our research told us. They told us if it was successful by buying it or not.

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.

Think about the market, think about the design, and think about who is going to design for that market. Hit the mark.

Forget about yourncompetitors, just focus on your customers.

Research is an organized method of trying to find out what you are going to do after you cannot do what you are doing now. It may also be said to be the method of keeping a customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has. That means constant improvement and change so that the customer will be stimulated to desire the new product enough to buy it to replace the one he has.

It's incredibly important to be - once you do have a product - acutely observational about the trends.

Too many bar owners built a bar for themselves... when they should have built what their market and demographic demands!

First and foremost, localization is a customer strategy, it's not a cost arbitrage or whatever.

Every employee at Workday thinks about how they are going to help customers be successful. It is a simple formula, but a lot of companies go out, and they don't listen to their customers; they don't try to solve hard problems, making it tougher for themselves to create a great business.

We really don't look at our competitors. The market is big. If you focus too much on competitors, you can lose focus on the customer. If we make our customers happier, we are going to win.

If you get the product and technology right, then the rest usually falls into place.

Quality and a great product matters, in startups, and in accelerators.

Customer-centricity is unbelievably important.

When you focus solely on valuation and market share, you win some and you lose some. When you focus on the needs of your customers and help them achieve their dreams, you win every time.

Success Comes from listening to your customer.

If you don't listen to your customers, someone else will.

When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.

The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.

You need to spend all of your time and energy on creating something that actually brings value to the people you're asking for money!

That's the name of the game ... pleasing the customer. If we ever lose sight of that fact, we've lost the ball game.

It's not the consumers' job to figure out what they want

Obsess about customers, not competitors.

The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. All business activities must be focused on this central purpose.

My view is that everything begins with the customer. If you know the customer, then you can match the merchandise and then you can market it. The marketing is kind of the icing. The foundation is the cake. That's the merchandise. Then the question is, "Do the customers want cake, or do they want cupcakes or donuts. What is it?"