Quotes About Innovation

Most importantly, Bezos didn't penalize Ian Freed and other Fire Phone managers, sending a strong message inside Amazon that taking risks was rewarded—especially if the entire debacle was primarily his own fault.

if you are running both businesses you will never go after the digital opportunity with tenacity

been finished. A month after the launch, Alan Atlas recalled, it crashed for nine hours, and hardly anyone in the outside world

willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes.

copyright © 2014 Hachette Book Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

You've built this lovely castle, and now all the barbarians are going to come riding on horses to attack the castle," Bezos said, according to a former AWS exec who reports hearing the comment. "You need a moat; what is the moat around the castle?

George instead reorganized Alexa around the Amazonian ideal of fast-moving "two pizza" teams, each devoted to a specific Alexa domain, like music, weather, lighting, thermostats, video devices, and so on. Each team was run by a so-called "single-threaded leader" who had ultimate control and absolute accountability over their success or failure. (The phrase comes from computer science terminology; a single-threaded program executes one command at a time.)

usually something unrelated to the task at hand, ricocheting your thoughts into an unexpected direction—a direction that inevitably leads to a solution linear thinking could never have approached.

Create the problem—then monetize the solution.

Who wants a library full of books you've already read?

Story after story has marched the same old WASP engineer paperdoll through the same old story lines, most of which were very good when they were used by H. G. Wells, but which are now showing signs of wear.

Even when they tell you "it can't be done, it's never been done, nobody's ever done it that way," all they're revealing about themselves is that they are limited, minimally-talented, inept, lazy to the point where they'll let the job walk out the door then have to stretch their imagination to figure out a way the job can be done, and they are not people you should be dealing with, because they can't solve their own problems, much less yours.

Who wants a Library full of books they've already read?

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

Good leaders don't wait for official permission to try out a new idea. In any organization, if you go looking for permission, you will inevitably find the one person who thinks his job is to say "No!" It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Samuel FB Morse's SECOND question over the telegraph was, Have you any news?

they have repeatedly overcome or worked around the forces of the actual—inertia, stasis, entropy—to probe the realm of the possible.

He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of gray house with sad brown doors.

there are ways of doing things you dont't know about

You won't find better people than in New York.