Quotes from Scott Berkun

in the scramble to survive, founders often hire to solve immediate needs and simultaneously create long-term problems. This mistake is common enough that Bob Sutton wrote a book, The No-Asshole Rule, to help executives recognize the damage these hires cause to culture.5 No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to "Be collaborative" or "Work as a team," if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose.

This is one big problem with working remotely: no one believes you have a job at all.

Making great things requires both intuition and logic, not a dominance of one over the other.

In this age, being seen as an "expert" may have little bearing on the "expert's" ability to do the thing she is supposedly an expert in.

Defensive management is blind to recognizing how obsessing about preventing bad things also prevents good things from happening or sometimes even prevents anything from happening at all.

Progress won't be a straight line but if you keep learning you will have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the way will help you get to where you want to go.

If removing a restriction improves performance or has no impact on performance but improves morale, everyone wins.

Without change and the occasional struggle, we can't learn or grow.

to call someone an artist means that they have a sense of higher purpose beyond commerce. Not that they don't profit from their work, or promote themselves, but that the work itself has spiritual, philosophical, emotional or experiential attributes as central goals.

The burden of deciding when to launch something is on the maker, not a marketer. If something is launched or a bug is fixed, data is instantly collected about how it's used, which serves as the basis to make quick revisions. There are no big schedules, few big plans, and no enforced mechanisms for coordination. It sounds like chaos, and it is. But if everyone understood chaos and perhaps liked the uncertainty, they would find freedom and opportunity.

If you lead an active intellectual and emotional life, your ideas will grow with you.

Imparting trust, the real meaning of delegation, is a powerful thing.

a small idea, applied consistently, can have disproportionately large effects.

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." — Buddha

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong... Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate, they're never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas.

the average person isn't that smart — and worse, half the population is dumber than that average person.

Human nature reciprocates positive emotion, and when you bring something real out, you invite others to follow.

The chief cause of problems is solutions. — Eric Sevareid

Often, QA has the best insight into design oversights and potential failure cases that others will overlook.

It's natural for people to protect what they know instead of leaping into the unknown, and managers are no exception. Managers might even be worse, as the politics they rely on to survive can make them more entrenched and defensive.

Socrates would probably say the only way to ensure you're not an asshole is to assume you are one.

At some point, all creative tasks become work. The interesting and fun challenges fade, and the ordinary, boring, inglorious work necessary to bring an idea to the world becomes the reality.

have to embody what I want the audience to be. If I want them to have fun, I have to have fun.

Silence between teachers' remarks is a very important part of a lecture. Silence provides time for consolidation and thought.