Quotes About Innovation

If you're solving someone else's problem, you're constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on.

you'd be amazed how much quality collective thought can be captured using two simple tools: a voice connection and a shared screen.

no one's upset by what you're saying, you're probably not pushing hard enough. (And you're probably boring, too.)

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it's almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute.

There's nothing wrong with staying small. You can do big things with a small team.

We don't throw more people at problems, we chop problems down until they can be carried across the finish line by teams of three

When you build a product or service, you make the call on hundreds of tiny decisions each day. If you're solving someone else's problem, you're constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is.

Forcing everyone into the office every day is an organizational SPoF.

Rather than demand whatever it takes, we ask, What will it take?

It's almost impossible to work on something and not be tempted to chase all the exciting new what-if and we-could-also ideas that come up. There's always one more thing it could do, one more improvement it should have. But if you actually want to make progress, you have to narrow as you go.

It begins with this idea: Your company is a product. Yes, the things you make are products (or services), but your company is the thing that makes those things. That's why your company should be your best product.

When someone copies you, they are copying a moment in time. They don't know the thinking that went into getting you to that moment in time, and they won't know the thinking that'll help you have a million more moments in time. They're stuck with what you left behind.

We've frequently been trapped by things that used to work well but no longer do.

Todos tenemos ideas. Las ideas son inmortales. Duran siempre. Lo que no dura siempre es la inspiración. Es como la fruta fresca o la leche: tiene fecha de caducidad. Si quieres hacer algo, tienes que hacerlo ahora.

It was amazing that it could be done, but we had forgotten to ask whether it should be done.

When we start designing something, we sketch out ideas with a big, thick Sharpie marker, instead of a ballpoint pen. Why? Pen points are too fine. They're too high-resolution. They encourage you to worry about things that you shouldn't worry about yet, like perfecting the shading or whether to use a dotted or dashed line. You end up focusing on things that should still be out of focus.

In thirty years' time, as technology moves forward even further, people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed. —RICHARD BRANSON, FOUNDER OF VIRGIN GROUP

If you want to make a product better, you have to keep tweaking, revising, and iterating. The same thing is true with a company.

Pour yourself into your product and everything around your product too: how you sell it, how you support it, how you explain it, and how you deliver it. Competitors can never copy the you in your product.

These half-baked, right-in-the-middle-of-something-else new ideas lead to half-finished, abandoned projects that litter the landscape and zap morale.

new customers today expect something different than new customers did a decade ago.

Given that, you're only going to frustrate yourself and everyone else if you summon the brain trust too frequently for those Kodak moments. Because either it means giving up on the last great idea (the one that still requires follow-up) or it means further stuffing the backlog of great ideas. A stuffed backlog is a stale backlog.

Accept that better ideas aren't necessarily better if they arrive after the train has left the station. If they're so good, they can catch the next one.

You wind up building what investors want instead of what customers want.