Quotes About Innovation

While Wilbur watched, Orville Wright made the first powered flight, or rather a short hop of 36 meters lasting twelve seconds, above the sandy beach at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina on December 17, 1903. Then they switched places and completed three more short flights: the last, and the longest one, lasted fifty-nine seconds. Remarkably, almost four years went by before anybody else could fly a heavier-than-air machine for more than a minute.

steel, ammonia, cement, and plastics.

The first commercial jetliner, the ill-fated British Comet (whose four deadly accidents were not caused by jet engines but by stress around square window frames that eventually led to catastrophic decompression), entered its brief service in 1952 at M 0.7, and the first successful and widely adopted jetliner, Boeing's 707, began its scheduled flights in October 1958 at M 0.83.

An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century.

An abundance of useful energy underlies and explains all the gains—from better eating to mass-scale travel; from mechanization of production and transport to instant personal electronic communication—that have become norms rather than exceptions in all affluent countries.

four pillars of modern civilization: ammonia, steel, concrete, and plastics.

For nearly a century, pig iron's high carbon content was lowered, and steel made by blasting the molten metal with cold air in open hearth furnaces; only after World War II were these replaced by basic oxygen and electric arc furnaces.

Without science, there would be no you; without you, the future would offer a much narrower prospect.

But I do sometimes wonder whether the technology has de-skilled us as detectives.

So I've got five books, a building, and a hundred bucks. I'm starting my business tomorrow.

In those days, leaving the old behind in times of starvation was not an unknown act, although in this band it was happening for the first time.

You need a "strange" culture and a "strange" strategy to differentiate your firm in the marketplace.

Recruiting Is a (Guerilla) Marketing Function

Graham Weston.

So how do you figure out an X-Factor? Start by asking: What is the one thing I hate most about my industry? What is driving me nuts? What is the choke point constraining the company? It could be a massive cost factor. It could be a massive time factor. The challenge is that you're often too close to the situation and as blind as everyone else to the real problems that have been accepted as industry norms.

SWT Instead For senior leaders, we propose replacing the SWOT with the SWT: an updated approach that identifies inherent Strengths and Weaknesses within their firms while exploring broader external Trends beyond their own industry or geography.

Jeff Bezos asks his team each week is what competitors have entered their market in the last seven days!

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don't

You can get by with decent People, Strategy, and Execution, but not a day without Cash. Cash becomes even more critical as the business scales up, since "growth sucks cash." The key is innovating ways to generate sufficient profit and cash flow internally, so you don't have to turn to banks (or sharks!) to fuel your growth.

think of Amazon's "two-pizza rule" — no team should be so big that it can't be fed with two pizzas).

All these great biz leaders know one thing — nothing interesting can come out of your brain that you don't put in first. Having a natural curiosity and thirst for learning separates the good from the great in our experience. Happy reading!

If your competitive advantage depends on your people creating something valuable and distinctive, then your workforce can't be normal.

Largely ignored, by gurus and governments, are the older, high-impact growth firms. Though they generate almost all of the innovation and job growth in economies, there are not enough of them to garner the favorable attention of politicians or book publishers. For more on this topic, read Verne's interview in Business Review Europe titled "Give the Gazelles a Break".

Practice what we preach • Nothing less than ecstatic customers • First class for less • Honor intellectual capitalists • Everyone an entrepreneur • Never, ever, ever give up