Quotes About Adaptability

Unlike most CEOs, when trying something new, Jeff Bezos and his senior team (known as the S Team) don't try to develop elaborate financial projections or return on investment calculations. "You can't put into a spreadsheet how people are going to behave around a new product," Bezos will say.

Experimental innovators like Rock, Brin and Page, Bezos, and Beethoven don't analyze new ideas too much too soon, try to hit narrow targets on unknown horizons, or put their hopes into one big bet. Instead of trying to develop elaborate plans to predict the success of their endeavors, they do things to discover what they should do.

Thus, a key flaw with the top-down, central planning approach is how limited it is in allowing us to be limber and able to discover new ways of doing things.

Remember that scene in the first Indiana Jones movie when someone asks Indy what he's going to do next, and he replies, "I don't know, I'm making it up as we go along." That's how I view leadership. It's an act of controlled improvisation, a Thelonious Monk finger exercise, from one moment to the next.

I've always been interested in getting players to think for themselves so that they can make difficult decisions in the heat of battle.

This man is different. He can fix anything, do anything. He doesn't work with knowledge, with science—the classified accumulation of facts. He knows nothing. It's not in his head, a form of learning. He works by intuition—his power is in his hands, not his head. Jack-of-all-trades. His hands! Like a painter, an artist. In his hands—and he cuts across our lives like a knife-blade.

Sometimes one must try anything, he decided. It is no disgrace. On the contrary, it is a sign of wisdom, of recognizing the situation.

The real question here is what happens to you, Gunther. In many ways you're a useful fellow to have around. Like a bent coat hanger in a toolbox, you're not something that was ever designed for a specific job, but you do manage to come in useful sometimes.

If anybody asks, 'Can you do this job? Can you handle it?' you tell 'em 'Absolutely.' By the time they find out that you can't, you'll have already learned, and the job'll be yours. And who knows, it might just turn out to be the opportunity of a lifetime.

A person should always carry two things in this world: a valid passport and a sweater.

Mao's conviction, "Give me a path wide enough to move a mule and I will move an army.

The minute you start thinking you know how things work, you're dead.

Without slack there is no tactical agility in the business.

Why "one size fits all" development methodologies don't work

He said there are two ways for a hitter to get the pitch he wants. The simplest way is not to want any pitch in particular. But the best way, he said -- which sounds almost the same, but is really very different -- is to want the very pitch you're gonna get. Including the one you can handle. But also the one that's gonna strike you out looking. And even the one that's maybe gonna bounce off your head.

One survival technique is a lack of wastefulness; the African puts everything to use.

You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real.

Most of filmmaking is common sense. If you stay on your toes and think about how to do a thing, it's right there.

That's the secret, Frank. Always have an iron in the fire. Always have another angle ready to go... Remember, if you can't outplay them, you have to outwork them. - Charles Schulz

Of course, to a true geek, the glass is neither half-full nor half-empty. It's twice as big as it currently needs to be, though a reasonable reserve margin is not a bad thing to have ready, just in case.

It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters.

Let it go and Hold on! In the way of so many great philosophies, those apparent opposites prove to be two sides of the same coin. To hold securely to the well-formed purposes of your own will, you must let go of the vain idea that you can control people or events or the tides of fate. You can't change what was, nor entirely control what will be. But you can choose who you are and what you stand for and what you will try to accomplish.

In a clutch or a corner, I tend to make a weapon out of what is near at hand. That can be anything from a crowbar to a cat, though if I had a choice, I would prefer an angry cat, which I have found to be more effective than a crowbar. Although weaponless, I left the house by the back door, with two chocolate-pumpkin cookies. It's a tough world out there, and a man has to armor himself against it however he can. ~Odd Thomas

Why do you insist on taking the scooter if you know you're not going to want to use it?'The child spoke with her wet lips brushing the flesh of her mother's ear: 'I don't know what I'm going to want until when I want it.