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 better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. Can they rally to solve key problems? If the answer is yes, you are managing well.
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.
Isn’t enough to pick a path—you must go down it.
When filmmakers, industrial designers, software designers, or people in any other creative profession merely cut up and reassemble what has come before, it givers the illusion of creativity, but it is...
When Brad Bird was directing The Incredibles, he had a recurring anxiety dream. In this dream, he was driving down a winding and precarious stretch of highway in a rickety old station wagon, with no o...
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...
The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.
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...
The seating arrangements and place cards were designed for the convenience of the leaders, including me. Sincerely believing that we were in an inclusive meeting, we saw nothing amiss because we didn’...
The lesson of ARPA had lodged in my brain: When faced with a challenge, get smarter.
The good stuff was hiding the bad stuff. I realised that this was something I needed to look out for: When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what's bugg...
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...
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...
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
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...
I said before that problems are easy to identify, but finding the source of those problems is extraordinarily difficult.
Driving the train doesn't set its course. The real job is laying the track.
Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.