Quotes About Problem-solving

Republicans must sell a big-cause, problem-solving vision - low-ego and happy-warrior in tone.

I've learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.

When meetings are the norm - the first resort, the go-to tool to discuss, debate, and solve every problem - they no longer work.

If you get stuck, draw with a different pen. Change your tools; it may free your thinking.

I can make just such ones if I had tools, and I could make tools if I had tools to make them with.

One of the most important tools in critical thinking about numbers is to grant yourself permission to generate wrong answers to mathematical problems you encounter. Deliberately wrong answers!

The way that Lucasfilm used ILM was George never restricted his thinking to things that he knew could be executed with the tools at the time. He would write what he thought would be cool and what he wanted from a storytelling standpoint with the assumption that, 'Well, they'll figure it out!'

We need a lot more technically literate people. The computers are the tools that are going to solve essentially all problems, and the people who can use them better will be more effective.

You've got to deal with the tools you have in hand. I'm a firm believer in that.

One day, my bike tire broke miles from home and I found a way to fix it. That's what I learned: Even if you don't have all the tools, you can improvise.

People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.

Your mind has an incredible ability to cross-pollinate—that is, to connect disparate things to solve problems in unique ways or envision new creations. Einstein attributed many of his physics breakthroughs to his violin breaks, which he believed helped him connect ideas in very different ways.

Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem.

If you want to hire someone motivated to perform the job at hand, determine whether the job is mainly goal-oriented or is mainly about troubleshooting. Do you need someone who is excited about working toward goals, or someone who delights in solving crises?

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.

Managers can waste a lot of time at the outset of a crisis denying that something went wrong. Skip that step.

You need to break a problem into pieces and do what is scheduled for each time slot

That is always our problem, not how to get control of people, but how all together we can get control of a situation.

From the depth of need and despair, people can work together, can organize themselves to solve their own problems and fill their own needs with dignity and strength.

A leader has a sound program, has a good policy, and then brings people together to solve problems.

Governors have to balance budgets. And they have to make decisions. And they have to do things that sometimes aren't popular. And they also have to bring people together to try to solve problems.

Engineers don't go to confession when they screw up; they find a fix.

People think I am trying to keep my ideas a secret, said Leonardo. But, in truth, I am left-handed, and when I write normally from left to right, I smear ink across the page. One day I realized that if I wrote backward, I would not be so messy. (p. 62)

In the search for a strong and permanent glue, Spencer Silver at 3M in Minneapolis found a weak and temporary adhesive instead. This was in 1968. Nobody could think of a use for it, until five years later a colleague named Art Fry remembered it when irritated by his place-markers falling out of a hymn-book while singing in a church choir. He went back to Silver and asked to apply the glue to small sheets of paper. The only paper lying around was bright yellow. The Post-it note was born.