The Ledger, every show

“And, ah, online learning is improving at such a rapid rate that Harvard Business School is getting disrupted.”

“And so giving anything away free is absolutely the wrong way to think about the problem.”

“And I can't tell you how many millions of slides I projected that shows that trajectory of technological progress almost always outstrips the ability of customers to use it actually isn't true.”

“There have been a few examples, but in every case, The leader who caught this next wave had to set up a completely different business unit and manage it independently with different processes, a different architecture or economic structure, and those have been…”

“In accounting, we teach people that you should ignore fixed and sunk costs and only look at the marginal cost and marginal revenue Associated with the proposal that you're making a decision about. And that idea that you should ignore sunk costs, and just look …”

“About 80% of the innovations that get that Funding from the corporation. You then deploy it into the market, and they fail. And why is it that you can't be correct more than 20% of the time?”

“If you understand what causes us to buy it, we can develop products that nail the job better and better and better, and that is really hard for a disruptive company to go after, because they enter the market thinking that if they make better products than the …”

“And so, hotels have been disrupted now because Airbnb has changed the business model.”

“Venture capital companies themselves become disrupted, because there is so much money. Then, what used to be a really interesting five million dollar deal, as you get so big, five million dollars just doesn't, isn't worth your while. And so, they go, they beco…”

“The reality is that the return to venture capital over the last 10 years overall has been nearly zero.”

“I think that we teach marketing wrong at the business schools, because when we want to know whether there's a growth opportunity, we look at the numbers about How many products are being sold? What's that trajectory of market? But what's really interesting is …”

“Almost always people will pay a premium price for a better product, and the reason why people will make a premium price for a better product is if you hire a product that doesn't do a job very well at all, then darn it, you have to shop and try something else,…”

“And I worry that Apple can easily lose that and do their research by looking outside And not understanding the essence of what the job has to be, you know.”

“So, historically, They've been very disruptive at every step in the way, you know, in ways that I didn't even see myself coming, but now I see modularity coming in at the bottom of the market, and accelerating the development, it's a cadence, you know.”

“As the company becomes successful, as Mark describes it, the nature of the data that surrounds the executives changes. And now the data is all about products and competitors and features. And in contrast to the first set of data, which is passive in this phase…”

“The worst place in the world to create a new business model is with, is within the old business model.”

“When we have a choice about how do we spend this extra ounce of time and energy unconsciously, we invest our time and energy where we get the immediate return, and that's not at home.”

“It is easier to hold to our principles a hundred percent of the time than it is 98% of the time.”

“Understanding the customer is the wrong unit of analysis. But rather, jobs arise in our lives, and we have to get these jobs done, and some are incremental little jobs, some are dramatic. When we realize that we have this job to do, we have to go out and find …”

“And once we understand the experiences we need to provide, then the last layer is what do we need to integrate and how do we need to integrate them so that you can provide these experiences required to get the job done. And that combination of that package of …”

“And so the owner is the third richest guy in the world. He got rich selling low quality furniture to the low end of humanity, and he becomes rich, right?”

“What I admire about Jobs and his legacy is that he did his research in front of a mirror, and if I have a need in my life, and there isn't something I could hire to get that job done, I betcha that job arises in lots of people's lives.”

“So I believe That it doesn't have to kill you, but it'll kill you if you don't understand how the world works.”

“And the reason for the long story is I think when the established leaders have a tough time capturing disruption, even though They think they understand it. What makes it hard is they don't have the common language in a common way to frame the problem.”

“Modularity enables new products to be developed so much faster. The gravity is shifting over to markets that are optimized by modular architectures.”

“And almost always, even for sophisticated high-tech products, They have emotional, social, and functional job, elements of the job.”

“In my language, I spent my life trying to provide more and more theories of causality so that people don't have to win by trial and error.”

“I realized that management is a noble profession. Because every day a good manager goes to work and does her best to help everybody in the organization to succeed more productively and rewardingly than they were able to do that before.”

“Part of my hope has been that if you have a theory that is useful and it describes a piece of how the world works, and if smart people understand the theory, they won't fail nearly as often.”

“So theories, when they emerge from the researchers' minds, never did they emerge perfect. They were always just kind of half-baked, and what success was predicated upon is subsequent researchers Had to find things in the world that the theory could not explain…”

“But I think what we learned is that a good theory has to be able to confront and resolve anomalies.”