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c5f249f
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One of the best ways to probe whether you can trust the advice that a theory is offering you is to look for anomalies--something that the theory cannot explain.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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060cb4e
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People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. It's a profound insight--first popularized by legendary Harvard marketing professor Ted Levitt decades ago.1
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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bb2b40b
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But in disruptive situations, action must be taken before careful plans are made. Because much less can be known about what markets need or how large they can become, plans must serve a very different purpose: They must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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b6bba35
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At a more serious level, the desirability of aligning our actions with the more powerful laws of nature, society, and psychology, in order to lead a productive life, is a central theme in many works, particularly the ancient Chinese classic, Tao te Ching.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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a16fa6f
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There's an old saying: find a job that you love and you'll never work a day in your life. People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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24b4dc4
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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 widel..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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bab2c92
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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."
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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5739dd5
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Each of us may have a different process for committing to our likeness. But what is universal is that your intent must be to answer this question: who do I truly want to become?
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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9b3957c
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Every hour I spent doing that while at Oxford, I wasn't studying applied econometrics. At the time, I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it. Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year,..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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ddefc27
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Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don't even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful. Those
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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cf364b4
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When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we "fire" it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem."
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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afc0ed0
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Self-esteem--the sense that "I'm not afraid to confront this problem and I think I can solve it"--doesn't come from abundant resources."
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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a298a99
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When the corporation's investment capital becomes impatient for growth, good money becomes bad money because it triggers a subsequent cascade of inevitable incorrect decisions. Innovators who seek funding for the disruptive innovations that could ultimately fuel the company's growth with a high probability of success now find that their trial balloons get shot down because they can't get big enough fast enough. Managers of most disruptive b..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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6cdc125
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Low-end disruption has occurred several times in retailing.16 For example, full-service department stores had a business model that enabled them to turn inventories three times per year. They needed to earn 40 percent gross margins to make money within their cost structure. They therefore earned 40 percent three times each year, for a 120 percent annual return on capital invested in inventory (ROCII). In the 1960s, discount retailers such a..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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8d8bba8
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The past is a good predictor of the future only when conditions in the future resemble conditions in the past. And what works for a firm in one context might not work for another firm in a different context.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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8de7298
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We could cite many cases of companies' similar attempts to create new-growth platforms after the core business had matured. They follow an all-too-similar pattern. When the core business approaches maturity and investors demand new growth, executives develop seemingly sensible strategies to generate it. Although they invest aggressively, their plans fail to create the needed growth fast enough; investors hammer the stock; management is sack..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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365d413
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The structures and initial conditions that are required for successful growth are enumerated in the chapters of this book. They include starting with a cost structure in which attractive profits can be earned at low price points and which can then be carried up-market; being in a disruptive position relative to competitors so that they are motivated to flee rather than fight; starting with a set of customers who had been nonconsumers so tha..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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ea2a44a
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Robert B. Barr and John Tagg, "From Teaching to Learning--A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education," Change,"
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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cbd8707
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People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do. This,
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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8da9fff
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One of the most common versions of this mistake that high-potential young professionals make is believing that investments in life can be sequenced.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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774509c
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Throughout this book we will refer to jobs in shorthand, simplistic terms for ease of reference--but it's important to emphasize that a well-defined job is multilayered and complex. And that is actually a good thing. Why? Because it means that perfectly satisfying someone's job likely requires not just creating a product, but engineering and delivering a whole set of experiences that address the many dimensions of the job and then integrati..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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This may sound counter intuitive, but I deeply believe that the path to happiness in a relationship is not just about finding someone who you think is going to make you happy. Rather, the reverse is equally true; the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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f40e7ad
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People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. It's
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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2b083b2
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The patterns of success and failure we see among firms faced with sustaining and disruptive technology change are a natural or systematic result of good managerial decisions. That is, in fact, why disruptive technologies confront innovators with such a dilemma. Working harder, being smarter, investing more aggressively, and listening more astutely to customers are all solutions to the problems posed by new sustaining technologies. But these..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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89bc775
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What would the cost of [a] hamburger at TGI Fridays be if, instead of paying for the outcome of good food delivered in a congenial location by friendly service, we actually just paid for the number of cooks . . . and how many wait staff that went by . . . What would happen to the price of a hamburger?
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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c420305
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As Medicare, Medicaid, and private health assistance companies pervasively inserted themselves between patients and providers, the market ultimately evolved toward what economists call monopsony--where a few huge, powerful buyers essentially determine the prices they will pay to their more fragmented suppliers.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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a2554b2
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Interestingly, even though MinuteClinic employs no doctors in its clinics, it has never been sued for malpractice. The reason is that malpractice lawsuits arise primarily in cases of mis-diagnosis and flawed therapeutic judgment.16 Because MinuteClinic practices in the realm of precision medicine, its diagnoses are precise and its therapies predictably effective.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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764da95
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is embedded in an organization in which most people are continually questioning why the project is being done at all. Projects make sense to people if they address the needs of important customers, if they positively impact the organization's needs for profit and growth, and if participating in the project enhances the career opportunities of talented employees. When a project doesn't have these characteristics, its manager spends much time..
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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ba8a3f5
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We will get growth and affordability in health care not by replicating the expertise of today's physicians in the form of new physicians. We will get it by embodying their expertise in devices and equipment, so expertise becomes widely available, more affordable, and much easier to obtain. This
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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43f3680
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Identifying disruptive footholds means connecting with specific jobs that people--your future customers--are trying to get done in their lives.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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1e954b4
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Notwithstanding the intense pressure on faculty members to publish, nationwide surveys indicate that they value teaching as highly as scholarly research.6 For every research superstar seeking international acclaim and association only with graduate students, there are many professors who value not only scholarship but also teaching and mentoring undergraduates.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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1b751e8
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One of the bittersweet rewards of success is, in fact, that as companies become large, they literally lose the capability to enter small emerging markets. This disability is not because of a change in the resources within the companies--their resources typically are vast. Rather, it is because their values change.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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dad9a41
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People who don't want to do something that they know they should do have marvelously inventive abilities to ignore what they know. They
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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135e08f
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On the other hand, the shortage of primary care physicians is so severe that 43.7 percent of the 21,885 residency positions in internal medicine in 2005 were filled by graduates of foreign medical schools30--because most of those coming out of American medical schools opt for training as specialists. This
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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6a5979c
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Rather, in our distorted fee-for-service world, the work to coordinate and oversee care just isn't as profitable as other activities.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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c7b42da
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The job that an EHR is designed to do is a systemic job, not a local one. It is designed to enable different providers in different locations to see what kinds of care other doctors and institutions have given or are rendering to a patient. It
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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66fa3f8
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Few people have physically and emotionally survived more than one SAP implementation project.42
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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e07eca0
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any program for resolving our runaway health-care costs that does not have a credible plan for changing the way we care for the chronically ill can't make more than a small dent in the total problem.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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8a8221f
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I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey. It
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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7397331
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Using flawed segmentation schemes, they often introduce products that customers don't want, because they aim at a target that is irrelevant to what customers are trying to get done.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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decd854
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But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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ee7811f
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Doctors today are under such pressure to see more patients that they simply don't have the time to spend with drug company salespeople. And doctors are much less dependent upon detailers to learn about drugs: there are alternatives. The Internet enables physicians to search for the right drug, and to refresh their knowledge of its side effect profile and possible interactions with other drugs, even while the patient is in the office.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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a5ce2ab
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understand and harness the principles of disruptive innovation.
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Clayton M. Christensen |
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6829596
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The most calamitous failures of prediction usually have a lot in common. We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is.
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Clayton M. Christensen |