One of my core management beliefs: If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
Philip Glass once said, The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but … getting rid of the damn thing.
It isn't enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staf...
There’s something else that bears repeating here: Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to a...
Steve used aggressive interplay as a kind of biological sonar. It was how he sized up the world.
If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to wo...
This is key to an idea I introduced earlier in the book: The director, or leader, can never lose the confidence of his or her crew. As long as you have been candid and had good reasons for making your...
• Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and unde...
I was a computer guy with an expensive dream.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure is a maxim that is taught and believed by many in both the business and education sectors. But in fact, the phrase is ridiculous—something said by people who ar...
Our models of the world so distort what we perceive that they can make it hard to see what is right in front of us. (I’m using model somewhat generally here to mean the preconceptions we have built up...
If you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.
When it come to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.
People want to hang on to things that work—stories that work, methods that work, strategies that work. You figure something out, it works, so you keep doing it—this is what an organization that is com...
If you think, you stink.
Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal. I
Fear of change—innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason—is a powerful force.
One of the first people I interviewed was Alvy Ray Smith, a charismatic Texan with a Ph.D. in computer science and a sparkling resume that included teaching stints at New York University and UC Berkel...
The trust comes from knowing that we are safe, that our colleagues will not judge us for failures but will encourage us to keep pushing the boundaries. But to me, the key is not to let this trust, our...
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