If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
Fear of change—innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason—is a powerful force.
But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.
• 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...
If you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.
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...
When it come to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.
When faced with complexity, it is reassuring to tell ourselves that we can uncover and understand every facet of every problem if we just try hard enough. But that’s a fallacy. The better approach, I...
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...
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...
There is an alternative approach to being wrong as fast as you can. It is the notion that if you carefully think everything through, if you are meticulous and plan well and consider all possible outco...
The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.
The Art of Animation
Sometimes a big event happens that changes everything. When it does, it tends to affirm the human tendency to treat big events as fundamentally different from smaller ones. That’s a problem, inside co...
Randomness is a concept that defies categorization; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can’t be anticipated. While we intellectually accept that it exists, our brains can’t completely grasp it...
People want decisiveness, but they also want honesty about when you’ve effed up,
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...
Merely repeating ideas means nothing. You must act—and think—accordingly.
I could see something that Bill couldn’t: Steve had responded to Bill’s passion about the issue. The fact that Bill was willing to stand up so forcefully and articulately for what he believed showed S...
Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.