The whole enterprise of teaching managers is steeped in the ethic of data-driven analytical support. The problem is, the data is only available about the past. So the way we've taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when it's too late.

There is no evidence that success in business will make us happy people or allow us to have happy families.

Efficiency innovations arise in industries that already exist. They provide existing goods and services at much lower costs. They are not empowering. Efficiency innovators become the low cost providers within an existing framework.

Christine and I haven't raised our children. A whole community of selfless Christians has contributed to helping them become faithful, competent adults.

Life is an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.

The process of writing 'The Innovator's Dilemma' entailed the developing a new theory. My colleagues, students and I have been improving that theory, and adding others to it, since that time.

When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.

Venture capital is always wanting to go up market.

Efficiency innovations are a natural part of the economic cycle, but these are the innovations that streamline process and actually reduce the number of available jobs.

For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core.

There are three types of innovations that affect jobs and capital: empowering innovations, sustaining innovations and efficiency innovations.

I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become.

Most marketers think there's a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don't exist.

There are direct paths to a successful career. But there are plenty of indirect paths, too.

Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That's not management, that's deal making. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.

I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?

Diabetes is a great example whereby, giving the patient the tools, you can manage yourself very well.

Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.

We have found that companies need to speak a common language because some of the suggested ways to harness disruptive innovation are seemingly counterintuitive. If companies don't have that common language, it is hard for them to come to consensus on a counterintuitive course of action.

No idea for a new growth business ever comes fully shaped. When it emerges, it's half-baked, and it then goes through a process of becoming fully shaped.

Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.

A great book seeks to explain causality, not correlation. It works to point out the circumstances in which it works, and where it doesn't. And in so doing, it is broadly applicable.

An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.

Finding a 'sacrificial lamb' on whom to tag blame for complicated problems is an important instrument in the toolkit of politicians, because it deflects blame for the nation's economic woes away from their own regulatory lapses, economic mismanagement and coddling to labor unions.