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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6ee818b | What are they really trying to accomplish and why isn't what they're doing now working? What is causing their desire for something new? One simple way to think about these questions is through storyboarding. Talk to consumers as if you're capturing their struggle in order to storyboard it later. Pixar has this down to a science: as you piece together your customers' struggle, you can literally sketch out their story: Once upon a time . . . .. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 693c403 | You'd think that it would make them all the more credible to be free of any obvious agenda or emotional bias, motivated only by objective logic. But there's something off-putting about these hyperrational types; they're immune to any appeals to common sense or humor, the for fuck's sake defense. [...] As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, "An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness"." | rational-debate rationality | Tim Kreider | |
| d07047c | Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews, | Howard Zinn | ||
| 10dedd1 | Most of the world's most successful innovators see problems through a different lens from the rest of us. Why didn't Hertz come up with a Zipcar-like product first? Kodak came close to creating a kind of Facebook product long before Mark Zuckerberg did. Major yogurt manufacturers understood that there might be a demand for Greek yogurt well before Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya launched what is now a $ 1 billion business. AT& T introduced a .. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 81aa9bf | To understand how revolutionary Pasteur's contributions were, consider the previously popular ideas that attempted to explain why people got sick. For nearly two thousand years, the medical profession believed that four different bodily fluids--blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile--dominated the health and moods of people. When they were in harmony, all was right with the world. When they were out of sync, people fell ill or into "bad.. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 616d401 | As long as Toyota is continually identifying "anomalies" in the manufacturing process, every single defect is seen as an opportunity to make the process better. There are, in effect, a set of rules that ensure that this happens. For example, an employee must never add value to a part until it is ready to be used in the next step of adding value. It must be done in the same way, every time. That way managers know, definitely, that the value-.. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 7eba6d1 | Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that good theory is what has been missing in the discussions about how companies can create successful innovations. Is innovation truly a crapshoot? Or is innovation difficult because we don't know what causes it to succeed? I've watched so many smart, capable managers wrestle with all kinds of innovation challenges and nagging questions, but seldom the most fundamental one: What causes a customer.. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 95931fc | What could happen if we changed our emphasis from push to pull? What if much more of the $143 billion spent on official development assistance in 2016 was channeled to support direct market-creation efforts in poor countries, even when the circumstances seemed unlikely? Imagine how many markets could be created; imagine how many Tolarams, Nollywoods, M-PESAs, and other new-market creators could emerge; imagine how many jobs could be created.. | Clayton M Christensen | ||
| eae8629 | And that's the trap of marginal thinking. You can see the immediate costs of investing, but it's really hard to accurately see the costs of not investing. When you decide that the upside of investing in the new product isn't substantial enough while you still have a perfectly acceptable existing product, you aren't taking into account a future in which somebody else brings the new product to market. You're assuming everything else--specific.. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 0ec5a73 | Our default instincts are so often just to support our children in a difficult moment. But if our children don't face difficult challenges, and sometimes fail along the way, they will not build the resilience they will need throughout their lives. People who hit their first significant career roadblock after years of nonstop achievement often fall apart. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| e889529 | Innovators were simply much more likely to question, observe, network, and experiment compared to typical executives. We published the results of our research in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| a36e231 | In January 1943, there appeared in a Negro newspaper this "Draftee's Prayer": Dear Lord, today I go to war: To fight, to die, Tell me what for? Dear Lord, I'll fight, I do not fear, Germans or Japs; My fears are here. America!" | fear war | Howard Zinn | |
| d0f648f | Correlation is enough," 2 then-Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson famously declared in 2008. We can, he implied, solve innovation problems by the sheer brute force of the data deluge. Ever since Michael Lewis chronicled the Oakland A's unlikely success in Moneyball (who knew on-base percentage was a better indicator of offensive success than batting averages?), organizations have been trying to find the Moneyball equivalent of customer da.. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 54f205c | other. As Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--But Some Don't, points out, "ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don't light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Haagen-Dazs." Of course, it's no surprise that correlation isn't the same as causality. But although most organizations know .. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| af0428e | WHEN YOU WERE ten years old and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, anything seemed possible. Astronaut. Archaeologist. Fireman. Baseball player. The first female president of the United States. Your answers then were guided simply by what you thought would make you really happy. There were no limits. There are a determined few who never lose sight of aspiring to do something that's truly meaningful to them. But for ma.. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 91fa19b | The safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. --C. S. Lewis | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 2215060 | But the better you are at asking the right questions, engaging in the right observations, eliciting ideas and feedback through networking with the right people, and running experiments, the less likely you are to fail. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 5b00f03 | So Medtronic adjusted not only its marketing efforts, but also the services it provided to directly target potential patients. For example, in conjunction with local cardiologists, Medtronic organized heart-health screening clinics across the country--providing prospective patients with free, direct access to specialists and high-tech equipment without having to go through an overwhelmed GP first. The question of paying for a pacemaker and .. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 1124568 | Data is not the phenomenon. It represents the phenomenon, but not very well. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 832a484 | On the surface, the Mayo Clinic is organized around the specialties of the doctors, like many other health organizations. But really, the main organizing principle is a process to get the right things in the right sequence to get the job done. When you think of the word "process" you might instantly conjure images of a manufacturing assembly line or a bureaucratic standard. But processes touch everything about the way an organization transf.. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| c1c2282 | In a small, independent organization, these small wins will generate energy and enthusiasm. In the mainstream, they would generate skepticism about whether we should even be in the business. I want my organization's customers to answer the question of whether we should be in the business. I don't want to spend my precious managerial energy constantly defending our existence to efficiency analysts in the mainstream. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| ed780fa | As difficult as it may seem, you've got to be honest with yourself about this whole process. Change can often be difficult, and it will probably seem easier to just stick with what you are already doing. That thinking can be dangerous. You're only kicking the can down the road, and you risk waking up one day, years later, looking into the mirror, asking yourself: "What am I doing with my life?" | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 6cb6d3b | We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it. Realizing this frees us to focus on the things that really matter. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 25e6352 | If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing." After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I've come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?" | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| b47006f | As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me--but rather from what they didn't do for me. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 7a40a51 | the prayers of those who hold religion in one hand, and | Howard Zinn | ||
| becbca4 | The logic is, for example, "I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isn't as critical. When our children are a bit older and begin to be interested in things that adults are interested in, then I can lift my foot off my career accelerator. That's when I'll focus on my family." Guess what. By that time the game is already over." | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 8659a7c | Work can bring you a sense of fulfillment--but it pales in comparison to the enduring happiness you can find in the intimate relationships that you cultivate with your family and close friends. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| f38cdde | No, you can't stay up late. No, you can't have a dog!" I recognized that I was one of those dads, searching for a moment to connect with my children. I'd been looking for something innocuous to which I could say "yes"--so I can feel like a kind and loving dad. So I'm standing there in line with my son in the late afternoon and I order my meal. Then my son pauses to look up at me, like only a son can, and asks, "Dad, can I have a milk shake,.. | Clayton M. Christensen | ||
| 82aa780 | Truman claimed was the figure given him | Howard Zinn | ||
| 5e43a29 | Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom it may. | Howard Zinn | ||
| c1b0a92 | grievances of the lowest classes mingled with | Howard Zinn | ||
| ba6e2d9 | Over the next three years, Pinchot turned the Division of Forestry into a Bureau of Forestry with a much larger budget and staff. Many of his closest associates in government had been fellow students at Yale--indeed, fellow members of Skull and Bones. | Francis Fukuyama | ||
| d6297dc | Racism was becoming more and more practical. | Howard Zinn | ||
| c9be859 | The opinion that the survival of Islam itself depended on the use of military slavery was shared by the great Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who lived in North Africa in the fourteenth century, contemporaneously with the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt. In the Muqadimmah, Ibn Khaldun says the following: When the [Abbasid] state was drowned in decadence and luxury and donned the garments of calamity and impotence and was overthrown by.. | Francis Fukuyama | ||
| e5c7276 | In Europe, demands for expanded popular participation came on the heels of war; the rise of the British Labour Party in the 1920s, for example, was in some ways a consequence of the sufferings of the working class in the trenches of World War I. In Latin America, by contrast, elites usually pulled back from interstate conflicts precisely to avoid having to turn to the masses for help. | Francis Fukuyama | ||
| dcfa8ae | The local Creole elites came to support independence in Mexico and Peru only because Ferdinand VII back in Spain agreed to accept the liberal constitution of 1812; independence for them was thus meant to prevent liberal reform from spreading to the New World.2 The makers of the American Revolution, by contrast, were liberal and democratic to the core. Independence from Britain served to embed democratic principles in the institutions of the.. | Francis Fukuyama | ||
| 1ef632a | Interest groups exercise influence way out of proportion to their place in society, distort both taxes and spending, and raise overall deficit levels through their ability to manipulate the budget in their favor. They also undermine the quality of public administration as a result of the multiple and often contradictory mandates they induce Congress to support. All of this has led to a crisis of representation, in which ordinary people feel.. | Francis Fukuyama | ||
| 902dc87 | The explosion of opportunities for litigation gave access and therefore power to many formerly excluded groups, beginning with African Americans. For this reason, litigation and the right to sue has been jealously guarded by many on the progressive left. But it also entailed large costs in terms of the quality of public policy. | Francis Fukuyama | ||
| 68205da | When used as an instrument of enforcement, the courts have morphed from constraints on government to mechanisms by which the scope of government has enormously expanded. | Francis Fukuyama | ||
| 13cf110 | Joseph Stalin was said to have contemptuously asked, "How many divisions has the pope?" | Francis Fukuyama | ||
| 8a8eac0 | The rule of law is critical for economic development; without clear property rights and contract enforcement, it is difficult for businesses to break out of small circles of trust. | Francis Fukuyama | ||
| b65ba9c | Unfortunately, the trading of political influence for money has come back in a big way in American politics, this time in a form that is perfectly legal and much harder to eradicate. Criminalized bribery is narrowly defined in American law as a transaction in which a politician and a private party explicitly agree upon a specific quid pro quo exchange. What is not covered by the law is what biologists call reciprocal altruism, or what an an.. | Francis Fukuyama | ||
| 82288df | The relatively high status of women in Western Europe was an accidental by-product of the church's self-interest. The church made it difficult for a widow to remarry within the family group and thereby reconvey her property back to the tribe, so she had to own the property herself. A woman's right to own property and dispose of it as she wished stood to benefit the church, since it provided a large source of donations from childless widows .. | Francis Fukuyama |