Else Christensen Quotes

... and it occured to me then and forever afterwards, that films, theatre books and poems were just a fraud. It's only music that doesn't deceive, it doesn't pretend to be anything else except what it is. Music.

Getting something wrong doesn’t mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else.

Imagining what would happen if you changed one thing you do on a daily basis—and thinking about how that change would affect everything else—is a clever way to conquer seemingly impossible scenarios and consider how even the smallest thing you deal with impacts everything else you do.

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.

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—specifically, the money you make on the old product—will continue forever exactly as it has up until now. A company may not see any consequences of that decision for some time. It might not get “caught” in the short term if a competitor doesn’t get ahead. But the company that makes all its decisions through this marginal-costs lens will, eventually, pay the price.

Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you’re good at. And staying competitive as the basis of competition shifts necessarily requires a willingness and ability to learn new things rather than clinging hopefully to the sources of past glory. The challenge for incumbent companies is to rebuild their ships while at sea, rather than dismantling themselves plank by plank while someone else builds a new, faster boat with what they cast overboard as detritus.

Harvard Business School professor and author Clay Christensen believes that you need to focus on the concept of the “job-to-be-done”; that is, when a customer buys a product, she is “hiring” it to do a particular job. Then there’s Brian Chesky of Airbnb, who said simply, “Build a product people love. Hire amazing people. What else is there to do? Everything else is fake work.” As Andrea Ovans aptly put it in her January 2015 Harvard Business Review article, “What Is a Business Model?”, it’s enough to make your head swim! For the purposes of this book, we’ll focus on the basic definition: a company’s business model describes how it generates financial returns by producing, selling, and supporting its products. What sets companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook apart, even from other successful high-tech companies, is that they have consistently been able to design and execute business models with characteristics that allow them to quickly achieve massive scale and sustainable competitive advantage. Of course, there isn’t a single perfect business model that works for every company, and trying to find one is a waste of time. But most great business models have certain characteristics in common. If you want to find your best business model, you should try to design one that maximizes four key growth factors and minimizes two key growth limiters.

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 Häagen-Dazs.” Of course, it’s no surprise that correlation isn’t the same as causality. But although most organizations know that, I don’t think they act as if there is a difference. They’re comfortable with correlation. It allows managers to sleep at night. But correlation does not reveal the one thing that matters most in innovation—the causality behind why I might purchase a particular solution. Yet few innovators frame their primary challenge around the discovery of a cause. Instead, they focus on how they can make their products better, more profitable, or differentiated from the competition. As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: “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? For me, this is a neat idea. 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. Every day stuff happens to us. Jobs arise in our lives that we need to get done. Some jobs are little (“ pass the time while waiting in line”), some are big (“ find a more fulfilling career”). Some surface unpredictably (“ dress for an out-of-town business meeting after the airline lost my suitcase”), some regularly (“ pack a healthy, tasty lunch for my daughter to take to school”). Other times we know they’re coming. When we realize we have a job to do, we reach out and pull something into our lives to get the job done. I might, for example, choose to buy the New York Times because I have a job to fill my time while waiting for a doctor’s appointment and I don’t want to read the boring magazines available in the lobby. Or perhaps because I’m a basketball fan and it’s March Madness time. It’s only when a job arises in my life that the Times can solve for me that I’ll choose to hire the paper to do it. Or perhaps I have it delivered to my door so that my neighbors think I’m informed—and nothing about their ZIP code or median household income will tell the Times that either.

Sleeping alone was another luxurious pleasure that should have been depressing but wasn’t. I got to hog the covers, sprawl across the whole mattress, use all the pillows, and move around as much as I wanted without worrying about disturbing anyone else. No one snored in my ear or talked in his sleep. No one woke me up. No one stole the covers or accidentally nudged me with his leg or got up and creaked the floorboards on the way to the bathroom. After my satisfying solitary dinner, I was the captain of my bed, the master of my sleep. But even so, I longed for a bedmate—the urge became stronger and stronger as the months went on. I became tired of the blue hour, cooking for one, eating everything all by myself, watching the cars streaming over the bridge, and daydreaming about falling in love.

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—specifically, the money you make on the old product—will continue forever exactly as it has up until now.

we’re guests like anyone else. Only Willie and Jean belong here. They both look as if they emerged from this place, were formed of the same rough planks, have become molecularly inseparable from it.

Do you understand the real reason why your customers choose your products or services? Or why they choose something else instead? How do your products or services help your customers to make progress in their lives? In which circumstances are they trying to make that progress? What are the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of this progress? What is competing with your products and services to address these jobs? Are there competitors outside of those included in the traditional view of your industry?

you’ve met me. I promise, everyone else will fail in comparison.” “Wow.” “I know. I’m sorry about that. Knowing me will ruin the rest of the male species for you.

Actually, you have a point. It may not be possible to live anywhere else in the solar system. What I said was that we need to explore the possibilities, then take care of the obstacles, or rule out the reckless and the impossible.” He sipped his water while the business leader quieted down.

Twenty years ago, this town was a backwater, a little provincial northern maritime outpost, isolated and gritty and rough, out of time. Now it seems to emanate a sharp electric hum, connected to the rest of the world, plugged into the motherboard, on the same frequency as everywhere else.

I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. It sounds simple, but like any important investment, these relationships need consistent attention and care. But there are two forces that will be constantly working against this happening. First, you’ll be routinely tempted to invest your resources else-where—in things that will provide you with a more immediate payoff. And second, your family and friends rarely shout the loudest to demand your attention. They love you and they want to support your career, too. That can add up to neglecting the people you care about most in the world. The theory of good money, bad money explains that the clock of building a fulfilling relationship is ticking from the start. If you don’t nurture and develop those relationships, they won’t be there to support you if you find yourself traversing some of the more challenging stretches of life, or as one of the most important sources of happiness in your life.

Each of us can point to one or two friendships we’ve unintentionally neglected when life got busy. You might be hoping that the bonds of your friendship are strong enough to endure such neglect, but that’s seldom the case. Even the most committed friends will attempt to stay the course for only so long before they choose to invest their own time, energy, and friendship somewhere else. If they do, the loss will be yours. People in their later years in life so often lament that they didn’t keep in better touch with friends and relatives who once mattered profoundly to them. Life just seemed to get in the way. The consequences of letting that happen, however, can be enormous. I’ve known too many people like Steve, who have had to walk through a health struggle or a divorce or a job loss alone—with nobody to provide a sounding board or other means of support. That can be the loneliest place in the world.