Notes Day wasn’t an end point but a beginning—a way of making room for our employees to step forward and think about their role in our company’s future. I said before that problems are easy to identif...
Not the confidence that we know exactly what to do at all times but the confidence that, together, we will figure it out.
Merely repeating ideas means nothing. You must act—and think—accordingly.
In this talk, I tell the story of how, when I was first a manager at New York Tech, I didn’t feel like a manager at all. And while I liked the idea of being in charge, I went to work every day feeling...
But in 1947, an American working in Japan turned that thinking on its head. His name was W. Edwards Deming, and he was a statistician who was known for his expertise in quality control. At the request...
A culture that allows everyone, no matter their position, to stop the assembly line, both figuratively and literally, maximizes the creative engagement of people who want to help. In other words, we m...
When someone hatches an original idea, it may be ungainly and poorly defined, but it is also the opposite of established and entrenched—and that is precisely what is most exciting about it. If, while...
It is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.
Good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in.
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
When you instantly resort to secrecy, you are telling people they can’t be trusted.
What made Notes Day work? To me, it boils down to three factors. First, there was a clear and focused goal. This wasn’t a free-for-all but a wide-ranging discussion (organized around topics suggested...
Walt Disney was one of my two boyhood idols. The other was Albert Einstein. To me, even at a young age, they represented the two poles of creativity. Disney was all about inventing the new. He brought...
Unlike some theoretical ideas, Occam’s Razor accords easily with human nature. In general, we seek what we think are simple explanations for events in our lives because we believe the simpler somethin...
Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it. Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t. Leaders must de...
To ensure quality, I believed, any person on any team needed to be able to identify a problem and, in effect, pull the cord to stop the line. To create a culture in which this was possible, you needed...
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 phenomenon I’m describing, rooted so firmly in that primal human drive for self-preservation, probably doesn’t sound surprising: We all know that people bring their best selves to interactions wit...
The most productive creative sessions allow for the exploration of myriad trains of thought.
The models we have of our relationships at work, with friends, in our families, and in our society are all even more complicated than our visual models. These constructs—call them personal models—shap...