Quotes About Innovation

successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?

awake at night?" The response is practically unanimous: Leaders worry about creating a sense of urgency in their organizations and operating quickly in an increasingly complex world. They want to create strong teams that are primed to handle any hurdle that comes their way and

Jugaad started as the Hindi word for an ultracheap vehicle first fashioned by rural Punjabi carpenters. Having nothing but empty pockets and a problem to solve, the local craftsmen took an old diesel irrigation pump, attached it to a wooden frame, and added wheels and the discarded steering system from a broken-down jeep. They called this jalopy "jugaad," roughly translated as "using few resources and a lot of determination to find an innovative solution to a problem.

KISS A LOT OF FROGS "The successful don't start with brilliant ideas … they discover them!" —Peter Sims, best-selling author and venture capitalist

If it ain't broke, don't fix it," when he added that those words are, in Powell's perspective, "a slogan for the complacent, the arrogant, or the scared." How can such a commonsense maxim be so insidious and disastrous? It's because of an immutable law of business: By the time you figure out it's broke, it's been broke for a very long time.

The right people are those who take the initiative to get things done, who make things happen and whom you come to count on for ideas for constant change and improvement.

We had to figure out a way to come up with big innovations, embrace change, and invent new services and products that would differentiate us from our competition and would let us grow faster than our industry. We were waiting for big ideas instead of using a system to innovate.

The late Ken Iverson, credited with originally leading Nucor down the path to constant change and innovation, frequently used a saying still invoked daily at the company: "Anything worth doing is worth failing at.

When confronted with problems, most companies try to make small changes or Band-Aid fixes and hope things get better or that the problem goes away. This approach doesn't work and ensures that they'll waste vast amounts of time and energy.

Executives at Walmart did just as Welch had suggested, disciplining themselves and their suppliers to work on "price-based costing" instead of "cost-based pricing." By ruthlessly rethinking, reengineering, and reinventing every little decision in every link of their supply chain, Sam Walton and his team created innovative new business models that delivered customers a much better deal.

The refrain we constantly heard from the entrepreneurs and leaders during our research was to never bet the ranch but to make lots of small bets, learn from them, and then scale.

The lesson is clear: Having too much money or too many resources can actually get in the way of successful reinvention.

Necessity is the mother of reinvention. —what Plato should have said

Steve Jobs frequently said, "Apple is an Ellis Island kind of company built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.

Every entrepreneur thinks about how his or her idea will be scaled, or grown big enough and quickly enough to create a real competitive advantage. But scale can't happen until there are systems

grow double digits each year for decades. To scale any business you must first create a reliable system for all functions—manufacturing, sales, promotion, talent acquisition, innovation, even leadership from the CEO.

Google started as a small library search project; Starbucks had no chairs and nonstop opera music at the beginning," Sims says. "Great entrepreneurs didn't start with big ideas, for the most part.

Businesses that do the best job of constant radical change and reinvention simply don't get blinded by the fairy tales of the biggest bets generating the biggest paydays. They realize that successful strategy is discovered by doing, and that doing has to be learned from making lots of small bets.

The microwave oven is the consolation prize in our struggle to understand physics.

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

I don't really care where movies come from as long as they're worth making.

We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.

Companies with new technologies are free to disrupt almost any industry they choose—journalism, television, music, manufacturing—so long as they don't disrupt the financial operating system churning beneath it all. Hell

Keep the progress, but recover the lost values. Technically, then he's talking about renaissance: the rebirth of old ideas in a new framework.