Quotes from Jason Jennings

Remember, the most common thing about common sense is how uncommon it is.

We're not very good when we're spending other people's money.

If it's DOA, bury it.

Today, every business, including yours, is being observed and studied by others who want your revenues.

Conventional wisdom won't provide continual growth.

Remind yourself daily to spend more time being interested then interesting.

Innovators "view failure not as a fatal character flaw but as a learning experience.

The company's twenty thousand workers are the best paid in the industry, but the company has the lowest labor cost per ton of steel, leads the industry in return on capital, has the lowest financial leverage of any major steel company, and has paid 142 consecutive dividends. Retaining the right people sets up the company to do lots more with less.

there are two honest reasons so many people hate the thought of the functions they perform being systematized: Either they're too inflexible to learn a new way of doing things, or they're scared to death of the accountability that systematization will bring.

we're not going to spend any money making the changes. If something doesn't work we'll fix it. We want creativity before capital and quick and crude rather than slow and elegant.

Lancaster says that the magic around a reinvention intervention is that the people involved in the process have a say but the establishment—the leadership—doesn't. "I was there as one member of a team wearing jeans and working alongside everyone else," says Lancaster, "not as a boss, owner, or CEO.

Lantech's reinvention intervention answers one of the most fundamental questions about embracing change: Whose idea wins? The answer, of course, is that the best idea should win—not the boss's idea, not the boss's kid's idea, not the strategy department's idea, not the old idea, not the competition's idea; only the best idea should win.

One of my favorite CEOs reminds me often that "memories are convenient." What he means is we more readily remember events that prove we're right.

Mean systems scapegoat and demoralize. They attack people instead of problems. They're a relic of a primitive and superstitious past. They are not data driven.

Lancaster takes us back to where we started, but with a brilliant twist. The test of intelligence is indeed the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in one's mind, appreciate both, and still function. But you don't have to be the be-all and end-all expert in your business at one side or the other. In fact, you can be the one who doesn't excel at either. You can be the one who appreciates both and creates the conditions for both sides to flourish.

in an effort to stop the bleeding, in one fell swoop Schultz closed one thousand underperforming stores, eliminated seven thousand positions, revised the business plan downward to numbers they could hit, and embraced radical change and began making a dizzying series of small bets.

A small business with a handful of employees might be able to handle two or three concurrent small bets, while a large company with thousands of employees should probably be considering hundreds of potential small bets and implementing scores of them.

Make as many small bets as you have people responsible for making them happen and sufficient financial resources to maximize the odds of success. If there aren't enough resources to give the small bet a chance, you'll never know if it might have worked out or been a possible home run.

Have some general backup ideas in mind, but don't let the backup plan be carved in stone. That will prevent you from learning. The time to begin building formalized backup plans is during the tweaking, changing, and maneuvering that occurs while studying the results of the small bet. Backup plans become vital when a small bet that's turned out to be successful is about to be scaled in size.

Customers, knowingly or not, seek an experience to accompany the product or service they're purchasing, and the business that offers the best experience in that category wins.

When a company is growing it is more likely to acknowledge the importance of its vendors and suppliers and treat them fairly. In return, its suppliers frequently become trusted partners in uncovering new business opportunities. When a company is constantly changing and its revenues and profits are growing you'll generally find a more engaged group of vendors and suppliers who are interested in truly being good business partners

If a business isn't growing between 5 and 10 percent annually, the good, highly talented people won't get the responsibility and the financial rewards they want, and they'll leave.

Your job as you know it and your business as it is currently run will eventually change. The only chance any of us have for prosperity is to constantly reimagine, rethink, and reinvent everything we do and how we do it in order to remain relevant. We must all become reinventors, and we'd better do it quickly.

Before you can implement radical change, you have to let go of the things that will destine your attempts for failure, and make letting go a vital part of your culture