Quotes About Progress

Abraham Lincoln said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Fears, worries, weariness, discouragement . . . all these things can impede our mobility.

They'll know we are transformed when our behavior truly changes. — James Stuart Bell

It's not the solution, Mr. Canton. It's the path to the solution that's fascinating.

Yet the nearly metamorphic quality of his successes would fully exceed the dominion of money.

There's a simple, but oft-neglected lesson here: to sustain success, you have to be willing to abandon things that are no longer successful.

There's no such thing as "sustaining" leadership; it must be reinvented again and again.

Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.

the most important question for any organization is this: Are we changing as fast as the world around us? For most organizations, the answer is no.

Because competence-building represents more cumulative learning than great leaps of inventiveness, it is difficult to "time compress" competence-building.

Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.

People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures." —F. M. Alexander

Your next step is simple. You are the first domino.

Other people labeled things impossible not because they couldn't be done, but because no one was doing them.

Gary L. McIntosh

We cannot cause growth; we can only create a climate in which growth can take place.

We can't educate today's students for tomorrow's challenges with yesterday's schools.

why would we want to freeze the system and disable our students by getting them perfectly ready for yesterday, when we know they will have to move headlong into a very different tomorrow? Every one of those students needs to be ready for life outside the trenches.

We have a choice. We can simply defend what we have or create what we need.

indebted to Eric von Hippel of MIT, who has inspired my work since we met in the early 1980s and who generously provided detailed comments and suggestions on several chapters.

Maybe it was always that way, discoveries happened because they needed to happen.

Change is good, but sometimes leaving things the way they've always been is better.

You want to stay hungry...to learn. You get full, you get sleepy, lazy; you get lazy, you don't learn.

Just as bad things could snowball, Brian found that good things could come fast as well.