Tucker: What's all this cloak and dagger business now? Abe: Yor office is wired. The boardroom. The whole plant. Even the washrooms. Tucker: What? Abe: Ever since you road tested the new car, forty G-men have been following you around the clock. Tucker: What for? Abe: You made the car too good. Tucker: Well that's the whole idea isn't it? To build a better mouse trap. Abe: Not if you're the mouse.
There are a lot of people that have dreams. I like to say everyone who has ever had a shower has had a good idea. It's the people who dry off and do something about them that make a difference.
Innovation occurs at the intersection of things. The greatest opportunities are in chaos. In times of, like, change, there's a maximum opportunity to change everything.
The future is all about integrating different interdisciplinary areas into one. So, anybody who is younger, go beyond just the computer science. Look at the arts. Look at what's happening in marine biology and then neuroscience. And you'll be able to bring all of those ideas into one and create something that nobody might have thought about.
Progress is not inevitable, and it really requires conscious effort. Sometimes, people ask me, why you? Why did you decide to work on this? And I think it's a strange question. A much more interesting question to me is why isn't everyone doing this? If there is something that's bothering you, I think it would be strange to just wait for somebody else to solve it.
For any new approach to take off, you need three things. First you have to run a pilot project showing that the approach works. Then the work has to sustain itself. Finally, the approach has to spread to other places.
When businesses spend their days hoping nothing too terrible will happen, and when they loose their will to excel and compete and delight, then they're the walking dead.
Innovation is an unnatural, generally uncomfortable process. It needs to be asked for, nurtured, demanded, and prodded - cattle prodded, at times - for companies to keep delivering.
A key element of unpredictability is the customer is very unpredictable but the job is very stable over time, and that brings predictability to innovation. If you understand the jobs to be done, you’re actually competing against companies who still believe it’s just a crap shoot.
A lot of the world has recognized that smart people, smart ideas, and the right environment are the only three levers you can pull, and they're pulling them.
Innovation efforts are risky and can (by definition) fail. And failure can sting. So if you haven’t figured out how to take some of the sting out of failure, you won’t get innovation.
If things aren't not failing you are not innovating enough.
I could either watch it happen, or be part of it.
When a tiger follows you, you can run much faster than you thought.
To pull off the type of growth that can carry a behemoth corporate from one decade to the next, a company must change ahead of the times--and define that change for everyone else.
No large company, and certainly no tech company, survives more than 100 years without reinventing itself many times.
Bubbles come and bubbles go. it happened with the railroads. It happened with electricity. It happened with radio. It happened with the personal computer. It happened with the internet. And it will happen again with unforeseen new technologies.
Technology induced change is nothing new. The real question is not, What is the role of technology? Rather, the real question is, How do good-to-great organizations think differently about technology.
Innovation isn't just about coming up with creative ideas. Those ideas must be implemented...Implementation includes everything required to realize sustainable value from an idea.
It's very difficult to actually find time to build innovative products when you're stuck in 6 hour-long meetings most days (i.e. there's little time left for actually "doing" the innovative work instead of just talking about it).
Most of us – people and businesses – rush towards the future without creating the culture that supports that future. We buy the watch but not the watchfulness.
Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.
All economic activity is by definition "high risk." And defending yesterday - that is, not innovating - is far more risky than making tomorrow.
Ideas are somewhat like babies - they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, "This is a damn-fool idea." Instead they ask, "What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?"
We have proved that thirty minutes of high-pitched mentality and spirit is worth more than a whole week below par.
Startups are unencumbered by the status quo. They re-envision how an industry can operate and grow, and they focus on better value propositions. On the low-end, they undercut cost structures, resulting in customer migration. At the high-end they create products and services that never existed before.
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
I imagine that one day long ago somebody rolled a rock down a hill and got an idea. The wheel.
If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.
Either I will find a way, or I will make one.
Tucker: What's all this cloak and dagger business now?
Abe: Yor office is wired. The boardroom. The whole plant. Even the washrooms.
Tucker: What?
Abe: Ever since you road tested the new car, forty G-men have been following you around the clock.
Tucker: What for?
Abe: You made the car too good.
Tucker: Well that's the whole idea isn't it? To build a better mouse trap.
Abe: Not if you're the mouse.
Missing Reference