The paradox explored in my book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is that successful companies can fail by making the 'right' decisions in the wrong situations.

I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they'll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered while at school. If they don't figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life.

Relative to the taxi industry, Uber is a sustaining innovation; that is, it makes customers' lives better. Uber targeted mainstream markets with a better service for existing customers, and it succeeded in serving them better than the incumbents.

A disruptive innovation is a technologically simple innovation in the form of a product, service, or business model that takes root in a tier of the market that is unattractive to the established leaders in an industry.

The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.

A major driver of the cost of healthcare in the United States is a compromise that was reached with the American Medical Association in the 1960s when Medicare was first established.

The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.

The single most important factor in our long-term happiness is the relationships we have with our family and close friends.

There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.

You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn't care.

Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.

Empowering innovations transform something that is complicated and expensive into something that is so much more simple and affordable that a much larger population can enjoy it.

Almost always, great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before.

Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life.

I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada.

There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it.

The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things?

If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.

When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy's 'Childhood,' his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think - that you can transmit something of what life is like now.

Girls, in particular, use storytelling to establish hierarchies, a pecking order. There is a sort of jockeying of who is in charge of shared history.

The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?'

I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives.

This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore.

I wish I were a really good photographer.