Quotes About Innovation

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

It doesn't matter that something you've done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.

I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world.

She spent seventy-seven dollars at Wayfair on a framed quote attributed to Socrates: The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

quote attributed to Socrates: The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

How is it we don't create new words when we see something that astonishes us? Why don't we make up new words for the things that make us feel new?

an interrobang is an unorthodox combination of question mark and exclamation point. How did this happen?!!!???

mind-exploding emoji!)

All your energy. Not on fighting the old. But on building the new. The secret of change.

Do all brilliant ideas seem brilliant from the very beginning, or do they seem far-fetched until they come into clearer focus?

A new line is a new mind.

The old ideas don't satisfy the new generation any longer, while the old generations are unable to accept and assimilate the new ideas.

To think about what is new, we cannot use old concepts— particularly not concepts that have been emptied of their meaning and their usefulness by the very assaults that brought about this break in human history. We cannot use concepts from Before, inherited from a world that exists no longer, to explore the After.

To efficiently produce quality products sounds like a good goal. But can that goal keep the plant working? I'm bothered by some of the examples that come to mind. If the goal is to produce a quality product efficiently, then how come Volkswagen isn't still making Bugs?

Somewhere in the scientific method lies the answer for the needed management techniques. It is obvious.

Henry Ford achieved the highest throughput per worker of any car manufacturing company of his time.

What is needed is just the courage to face inconsistencies and to avoid running away from them just because "that's the way it was always done".

Whenever we think we have final answers progress, science, and better understanding ceases.

Deciding that the company is wasting too much money on duplicated efforts and thus moving to a more centralized mode. Ten years later, we want to encourage entrepreneurship and we move back to decentralization.

Was your plant able to ship even one more product per day as a result of what happened in the department where you installed the robots?

Ford's starting point was that the key for effective production is to concentrate on improving the overall flow of products through the operations. His efforts to improve flow were so successful that, by 1926, the lead time from mining the iron ore to having a completed car composed of more than 5,000 parts, on the train ready for delivery, was 81 hours!3 Eighty years later, no car manufacturer in the world has been able to achieve, or even come close, to such a short lead time.

The daring nature of Ford's method is revealed when one realizes that a direct consequence of limiting the space is that when the allotted space is full, the workers feeding it must stop producing. Therefore, in order to achieve flow, Ford had to abolish local efficiencies. In other words, flow lines are flying in the face of conventional wisdom; the convention that, to be effective, every worker and every work center have to be busy 100% of the time.

sit there marveling that we're going to reduce the efficiency of some operations and make the entire plant more productive.

I sit there marveling that we're going to reduce the efficiency of some operations and make the entire plant more productive.