Quotes About Adaptation

If you don't know how it works, find out. If you're not sure if it will work, try it. If it doesn't make sense, play with it until it does. If it's not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out.

It's not time, Take it easy, Wait and see, It's someone else's turn - none of these stalls are appropriate for a leader in search of change. There's a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late. The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

Initiative and starting are about neither of these. They are about "let's see" and "try." If there's no clear right answer, perhaps the thing you ought to do is something new. Something new is often the right path when the world is complicated.

Change isn't made by asking permission. Change is made by asking forgiveness, later.

Teaching Fire a Lesson Fire is hot. That's what it does. If you get burned by fire, you can be annoyed at yourself, but being angry at fire doesn't do you much good. And trying to teach the fire a lesson so it won't be hot next time is certainly not time well spent. Our inclination is to give fire a pass, because it's not human. But human beings are similar, in that they're not going to change any time soon either.

Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.

For many of us, the happiest future is one that's precisely like the past, except a little better

You become a winner because you're good at losing.

Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new.

In unstable times, growth comes from leaders who create change and engage their organizations, instead of from managers who push their employees to do more for less.

There's not a lot to say about the Cul-de-Sac except to realize that it exists and to embrace the fact that when you find one, you need to get off it, fast. That's because a dead end is keeping you from doing something else. The opportunity cost of investing your life in something that's not going to get better is just too high.

To be willing to do new things you don't think you'll like requires you to prefer the unknown. Not just tolerate it, but to prefer it.

Think for a second about the people you know who are engaged, satisfied, eager to get to work. Most of them, I'll bet, make change.

the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you'll never begin.

The thermostat, on the other hand, manages to change the environment in sync with the outside world. Every organization needs at least one thermostat. These are leaders who can create change in response to the outside world, and do it consistently over time.

Our society is struggling because during times of change, the very last people you need on your team are well-paid bureaucrats, note takers, literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees.

Seeing clearly means that you're smart enough to know when a project is doomed, or brave enough to persevere when your colleagues are fleeing for the hills. Abandoning your worldview in order to try on someone else's is the first step in being able to see things as they are.

Managers manage a process they've seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible. Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in.

I'm imagining that your colleagues aren't stupid. But when the world changes, the rules change. And if you insist on playing today's games by yesterday's rules, you're stuck. Stuck with a stupid strategy. Because the world changed. Some organizations are stuck. Others move quickly. In a changing world, who's having more fun?

Don't fall in love with a tactic and defend it forever. Instead, decide once and for all whether you're in a market or not. And if you are, get through that Dip.

Leaders understand a different calculus. Leaders understand that change is not only omnipresent, but the key to success.

Every day you stay is a bad strategic decision for your career because every day you get better at something that isn't that useful—and you are another day behind others who are learning something more useful.

Every single important thing we do is something we didn't use to be good at, and in fact, might be something we used to fear.