Quotes About Innovation

When you find them, blow them up a little for me.

Not a very original title," I said. "Well, physicists save their imagination for other things." Harry chuckled.

We all looked. "Mate, those look like fossilized turds," Kahurangi said. "That's why we call them poopfruit, yes," Tom said. "You need to talk to your marketing people," I suggested. "They taste better than they look." "They would have to, wouldn't they?

It's easier to be the aspirational leader when the thing you're building doesn't exist. But now it exists, and you're not aspirational anymore. Now you're just the chief bureaucrat. Bureaucrats don't inspire awe.

A&R really did involve both artists and repertoire—discovering

The only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don't even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.

The Harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions, the more likely there's gold in letting go of them.

Institutions designed for push cannot easily accommodate pull.

As the Big Shift takes hold, companies are no longer places that exist to drive down costs by getting increasingly bigger. They're places that support and organize talented individuals to get better faster by working with others. The rationale of the firm shifts from scalable efficiency to scalable learning—the ability to improve performance more rapidly and learn faster by effectively integrating more and more participants distributed across traditional institutional boundaries.

Rather than focusing on attracting and retaining talent, as they do today, institutional leaders must shift their attention to accessing and developing talent.

Institutional leaders will need to seek out "reverse mentors" among (often younger) individuals who can help them understand and master edge practices.

True innovation does not happen when we control creativity," Shai wrote in 2005, "but when we challenge, create shared vision, and passionately pursue excellence."3

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff

Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.

We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten.

The last clear definite function of men—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man.

Bring new eyes to a world even new lenses and presto, new world.

The little engine roared and then stopped. Adam sat back for a moment, limp but proud, before he got out. The postmaster looked out between the bars of his golden grill. I see you've got one of the damn things, he said. Have to keep up with the times, said Adam. I predict there'll come a time when you can't find a horse, Mr. Trask. Maybe so. They'll change the face of the countryside. They get their clatter into everything, the postmaster went on.

Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris

Can you think that whatever made us—would stop trying?