Quotes About Innovation

also introduced another controversial feature—an elevator, described as a "perpendicular railway intersecting each story." Theretofore, elevators had been installed only in a few of the taller office buildings.

New York in the 1880's was already a city that seemed to have made up its mind that whatever existed was dispensable and replaceable

In 1884, the year that the Dakota was completed, the architect Richard Morris Hunt had put the finishing touches on a huge new building on Park Row to house Whitelaw Reid's New York Tribune. The Tribune tower soared an unprecedented eleven stories into the sky and was topped by a tall campanile, but it was not to be New York's tallest building for long. A year later Bradford Lee Gilbert designed the Tower Building, to be erected at 50 Broadway.

New York seemed capable of creating everything but a style of its own.

Beginning with roughly a hundred acres (before he had finished he had added another three hundred), Mr. Lawrence decided to build a town. When his contractor asked him where to put the streets, Lawrence looked at the cow paths meandering up and down the hills and said, "Why not make the streets follow the cow paths?" And so, following the rules of bovine common sense, there the streets are for Mr. Mumford to admire.

The trouble is that organizations like processes. They are warm, familiar things and can be rolled out fairly easily. It is therefore tempting to understand strategy execution as a process, distribute the forms, get everyone to fill them in, and relax. The result will be resentment, rigidity, and stagnation.

Ohno is credited with the saying that "having no problems is the biggest problem of all." The result is the most productive automotive manufacturing system in the world today, which is sustaining its lead despite every attempt by its rivals to copy it. It has its origins in the need to overcome a constraint.

His methods did not only develop what Argyris and Schon have called "single-loop learning," in which an organization learns to correct its actions so as to carry on its current policies and fulfill its current objectives, but "double-loop learning," in which the organization's policies, objectives, and behavioral norms are modified.11

Those who rejected it wholesale, as Agassiz did, consigned themselves to increasing irrelevance. AGASSIZ

All this notwithstanding, I have long been aware of strong reasons for doubting that mutation and selection can add enough new information of the right kind to account for large-scale, or "macroevolutionary," innovations—the various information revolutions that have occurred after the origin of life.

host of distinguished biologists have explained in recent technical papers, small-scale, or "microevolutionary," change cannot be extrapolated to explain large-scale, or "macroevolutionary," innovation

Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense.

Edmund Morris. Beethoven: The Universal Composer. HarperCollins: New York, 2005

Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.

Employers and business leaders need people who can think for themselves - who can take initiative and be the solution to problems.

Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.

small batches of work, small teams, short cycles, and quick feedback—in effect, "small everything.

Agile management is about working smarter rather than harder. It's not about doing more work in less time: It's about generating more value from less work.

If you are thinking about Agile as a set of tools and processes, you're looking for the wrong thing. You can't go to the store and "buy some Agile management.

Many firms fail to see that since generally all organizations have access to the same rapidly evolving technology, competitive advantage flows not from the technology itself but rather from the agility with which organizations understand and adapt the technology to meet customers' real needs.

In other words, firms don't have to be "born Agile," like Spotify. Even big, old firms can undertake an Agile transformation if they set their minds and hearts to it—and stick with it.

The premise of Agile management is that empowering bottom-up innovation will steadily add significant value for customers and the firm.

Originality, of course, is what occurs when something new arises out of what's already been done.

Method is the most sterile of all concerns…. Nothing was ever accomplished through method alone.