Quotes About Innovation

Be there first, be there fast, build market share—no matter how expensive—and you win," yelled the entrepreneurs.

This brings us to a central truth about organizations: they are inherently messy. There are no panaceas, no structures that solve all problems. Any attempts to completely eliminate the mess are doomed to failure. Yes, there are costly inefficiencies in decentralization, but the fire of personal ownership—of being our own little business—elevates human motivation and stimulates innovation in powerful, albeit somewhat chaotic, ways.

We all snickered at some writers who viewed Dad [Sam Walton] as a grand strategist who intuitively developed complex plans and implemented them with precision. Dad thrived on change, and no decision was ever sacred.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a great company is that it doesn't stop trying to change, improve, and do new things. A great company never arrives, never believes that it is good enough.

The good-to-great leaders understood three simple truths. First, if you begin with "who," rather than "what," you can more easily adapt to a changing world.

3M didn't sell raw materials, so there was no business to transact. But McKnight—curiosity piqued and on the prowl for interesting new ideas that might move the company forward—asked a simple question: "Why does Mr. Okie want these samples?"35

Twenty percent of our success is the new technology that we embrace ... [but] eighty percent of our success is in the culture of our company."24 Indeed

And while you must create robust new extensions to your flywheel (and given enough time, you might even create entirely new flywheels) be sure to keep building momentum with your winning strategies. Never forget, the Next Big Thing is very likely the Big Thing you already have. Make the most of your victories. Keep turning the flywheel.

Technology and technology-driven change has virtually nothing to do with igniting a transformation from good to great. Technology can accelerate a transformation, but technology cannot cause a transformation.

We all know now that the 747 became the flagship jumbo jet of the airline industry, but the decision looks much different from the perspective of the late 1960s. Yet—and this is the key point—Boeing was willing to make the bold move in the face of the risks. As in Boeing's case, the risks do not always come without pain.

Vision provides guidance about what core to preserve and what future to stimulate progress toward.

focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.

When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. Technology

Asked to paint a picture of the company in 20 years, the executives mentioned such things as "on the cover of Business Week as a model success story . . . the Fortune most admired top-ten list . . . the best science and business graduates want to work here . . . people on airplanes rave about one of our products to seatmates . . . 20 consecutive years of profitable growth . . . an entrepreneurial culture that has spawned half a dozen new divisions from within . . .

Merck • Corporate social responsibility • Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company • Science-based innovation • Honesty and integrity • Profit, but profit from work that benefits humanity Nordstrom

Having a great idea or being a charismatic visionary leader is "time telling"; building a company that can prosper far beyond the presence of any single leader and through multiple product life cycles is "clock building.

Enduring great companies preserve their core values and purpose while their business strategies and operating practices endlessly adapt to a changing world. This is the magical combination of "preserve the core and stimulate progress.

Searching for a single great idea upon which to build success is time telling. Building an organization that can generate many great ideas is clock building. Our research showed that leaders who build enduring great companies make the shift from time telling to clock building. Clock builders create highly replicable recipes, extensive training programs, leadership-development pipelines, and tangible mechanisms to reinforce core values.

that if] you created the right type of corporate community, the right type of autonomous congregation, genius would flower.

good-to-great companies did not focus principally on what to do to become great; they focused equally on what not to do and what to stop doing.

the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19

Leaders die, products become obsolete, markets change, new technologies emerge, and management fads come and go, but core ideology in a great company endures as a source of guidance and inspiration.

the big winners in corporate history consistently surpassed a threshold level of innovation required to compete in their industries. But what truly set the big winners apart was their ability to turn initial success into a sustained flywheel, even if they started out behind the pioneers

In Chapter 8, "Innovation," we stress the importance of decentralization and autonomy. The problem, of course, is how to unleash individual creativity and, at the same time, move in a unified direction. Vision is the link. If all people in the company have a guiding star on which to sight (a common vision), they can be dispersed in hundreds of independent little boats, rowing in the same direction.