Archive
Every quote and its note, in the order added.
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Schedule Your Priorities
“The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
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Without Theory, There Is No Learning
“Experience teaches nothing. In fact there is no experience to record without theory… Without theory there is no learning… And that is their downfall. People copy examples and then they wonder what is the trouble. They look at examples and without theory they learn nothing.”
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But to Survive, We Must Learn
“Learning is not compulsory; it's voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it's voluntary. But to survive, we must learn.”
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Is Anybody Listening?
“The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it.”
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No Credit for Predicting Rain
“As a leader, you don't get any credit for predicting the rain. You only get credit for building the ark.”
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Decisions at 70%
“…most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow.”
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Two-Way Doors
“Some decisions are consequential and irreversible… one-way doors… these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly… But most decisions aren't like that—they are changeable, reversible—they're two-way doors… Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly.”
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Hire Slow, Fire Fast
“Hire Slow, Fire Fast”
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Positive Energy and Positive Results
“Positive energy and positive people create positive results.”
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The Story Is the Strategy
“A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy... In good companies, the story and the strategy are the same thing.”
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Competing With One PM
“When a startup is competing against a large competitor, they aren't competing with the entire company, they are likely competing with some PM focused on internal politics/career progression. With this framing, it shouldn't be surprising to see startups win as often as they do.”
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The Twenty-Slot Punch Card
“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you'd punched through the card, you couldn't make any more investments at all.”
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Saying No
“It [Apple's innovation] comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”
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Price Has to Be the Starting Point
“No asset is so good that it can't become a bad investment if bought at too high a price.”
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Planning, Not Plans
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
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Launched Too Late
“If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”
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Assume Positive Intent
“I learned to always assume positive intent... When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed.”
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The Biggest Risk Is Not Taking Any Risk
“In a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.”
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The Next Bill Gates Won't Build an Operating System
“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them.”
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Maybe a Great Idea, Maybe You're Nuts
“I often say that when you think you have this really great idea and everyone else thinks you're nuts, there's one or two possibilities. You have a really great idea; the other possibility is you're nuts.”
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Day 1 Vitality
“There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused… But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.”
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Why the Long Horizon
“I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.”
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Word of Mouth Beats Advertising
“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
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The Handshake Test
“[There are] things that we can't teach... smile and attitude has to come with someone to the interview and the job.”
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Hiring and Developing
“I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.”
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Skills Can Be Taught
“Skills can be taught. Character you either have or don't have.”
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No Hierarchy of Ideas
“Apple was a very bottom-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies... hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do.”
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People First, Then Product, Then Profits
“In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. People come first. Unless you've got a good team, you can't do much with the other two.”
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The Right People
“People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”
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Lazy and Dumb
“We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don't have the latter, the first two will kill you.”
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Guided, Taught, Led
“The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake. The best people don't need to be managed. Guided, taught, led—yes. But not tightly managed.”
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Anecdotes Beat the Dashboard
“When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. It's usually not that the data is being miscollected. It's usually that you're not measuring the right thing.”
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Optimizing the Thing That Shouldn't Exist
“Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.”
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Leadership Is Preparing for Change
“They don't make plans; they don't solve problems; they don't even organize people. What leaders really do is prepare organizations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it.”
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Urgency Is the Absence of Complacency, Not Panic
“A higher rate of urgency does not imply ever-present panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent.”
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People Over Process
“It was not obvious at the time, even to me, but we had one thing that Blockbuster did not: a culture that valued people over process, emphasized innovation over efficiency, and had very few controls.”
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ABCD
“Always Be Connecting Dots”
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Stunning Colleagues
“A Great Workplace Is Stunning Colleagues”
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Doing the Wrong Thing Well
“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
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Intelligence Above a Threshold, Determination Above That
“But as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination.”
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Run by Ideas
“You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win. Otherwise good people don't stay.”
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Release Ideas at the Rate the Organization Can Accept
“You have to release the work at the right rate so that the organization can accept it.”
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Aligning the Vectors
“If people were negative, they were not in the next meeting... A company is a bunch of vectors. Each person is a vector. And they need to point in the direction that you want to go. Bureaucracy, office politics, and low morale, it's almost random vectors. He was always about making all the vectors... pointing in the right direction.”
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Raise the Average
“During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision: Will you admire this person? Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they're entering? Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?”
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Hire for Strength, Not Lack of Weakness
“I'd learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell's instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.”
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PhDs and Shipping
“PhDs are the hardest people to motivate to ship commercially viable products—with rare exception.”
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Great Things, First Time
“I'm a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time.”
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Set Your Culture on Purpose
“If you don't methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.”
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If A Timeline Is Long
“If a timeline is long, it's wrong.”
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Automate Last
“Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.”
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What You Ignore Becomes the Culture
“If you see something off-culture and ignore it, you've created a new culture.”
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Iron Law of Bureaucracy
“In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. ... The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization...”
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Manage the Conditions
“You can't manage creativity--you can only manage for creativity.”
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Hire For the Next Role, Not This One
“Remember that in a startup, anyone you hire is likely to be doing a new job in three to six months. Smart and effective people are adaptable.”
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Hire for Slope
“Hire for slope, not y-intercept.”
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Principles of Senior Hiring
“The best way to evaluate someone is to work with them.”
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When in Doubt, Don't Hire
“When in doubt, don't hire—keep looking.”
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Strategic Inflection Points
“Only the paranoid survive.”
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Missionaries vs. Mercenaries
“We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries. Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers.”
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Talent Density
“If you have a team of five stunning employees and two adequate ones, the adequate ones will sap managers' energy… reduce the quality of group discussions… drive staff who seek excellence to quit, and show the team you accept mediocrity.”
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Fix Mistakes Fast, Not Too Fast
“Fix your mistakes fast… but not too fast. If you are super-scrupulous about your hiring process, you'll still have maybe a 70% success rate of a new person really working out—if you're lucky.”
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WHO Over WHAT
“People often make the mistake of focusing on what should be done while neglecting the more important question of who should be given the responsibility for determining what should be done. That's backward.”
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Direction Over Force
“Picking the direction you're heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply.”
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The Power of Incentives
“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.”
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Choosing What Not To Do
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
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A Few Who Love You, Not a Lot Ambivalent
“Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.”
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Judgment Over Ideas
“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”
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All Happy Companies Are Different
“All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: They failed to escape competition.”
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Bring Me Problems
“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.”
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Business Plans Versus Business Models
“No business plan survives its first contact with customers.”
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The Mantra Behind OKRs
“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”
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The Customer Is the Only Boss
“There is only one boss… It's the customer! … the customer can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, and he can do it simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
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Innovation, Not Tradition
“Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation.”
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The Hock Principle
“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.”
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Can't or Won't
“When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can't do it or won't do it.”
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Take the Experience First
“In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins; cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.”
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In That Order
“People, ideas, hardware—in that order.”
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Systems Set the Floor
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
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Barrels and Ammunition
“Most people, most great people even are ammunition. But what you need in your company are barrels… A barrel… can take an idea from conception all the way through shipping and bring people with them.”
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The Work Is in the Thinking
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
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Disagree and Commit
“…use the phrase 'disagree and commit.' This phrase will save a lot of time.”
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Some Things Just Take Time
“No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: you can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”
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Designing for Candor
“A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments.”
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Embrace Bad News
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
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Barksdaleism
“If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine.”
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Hell Yeah or No
“If you're not saying 'HELL YEAH!' about something, say no.”
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The Too Hard Pile
“I have a way of handling a lot of problems. I put them on what I call my 'too hard pile' and I just leave them there. I'm not trying to succeed in my too hard pile.”
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Stop Doing Lists
“Those who built the good-to-great companies… made as much use of 'stop doing' lists as 'to do' lists.”
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On Trial for Its Life
“The change leader puts every product, every service, every process, every market, every distribution channel, every customer and end-use, on trial for its life… The question to ask is: 'If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we now know, go into it?'”
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Abandon Yesterday to Create Tomorrow
“If leaders are unable to slough off yesterday, to abandon yesterday, they simply will not be able to create tomorrow.”
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Posteriorities
“…The job is, however, not to set priorities. That is easy. Everybody can do it. The reason why so few executives concentrate is the difficulty of setting 'posteriorities'—that is, deciding what tasks not to tackle—and of sticking to the decision.”
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Bucket, Not Thimble
“Big opportunities come infrequently. When it's raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.”
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A Small-Market Monopoly First
“You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand.”
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Emergent Architecture
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
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Why Knowledge Workers Manage Themselves
“Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.”
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Both Halves
“We restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call 'shared consciousness') and decentralized decision-making authority ('empowered execution').”
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The First Hundred Are Referrals
“Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first at least 100 employees and often many more.”
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Tell Engineers the Problem, Not the Features
“If you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, I'm going to throw you out on the street.”
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Walk Out of the Meeting
“Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time.… Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value.”
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Reasoning From First Principles
“I tend to approach things from a physics framework. Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.”
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You Cannot Install Quality Control
“'We installed quality control.' No. You can install a new desk, or a new carpet, or a new dean, but not quality control. Anyone that proposes to 'install quality control' unfortunately has little knowledge about quality control.”
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Without Seeing the Process, No Improvement
“If people do not see the process, they can not improve it.”
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Task-Relevant Maturity
“How often you monitor should not be based on what you believe your subordinate can do in general, but on his experience with a specific task and his prior performance with it—his task-relevant maturity…”
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Jobs to Be Done
“When people find themselves needing to get a job done, they essentially hire products to do that job for them.”
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B Players
“Mediocrity is the silent killer. Organizations are not getting killed by their C players… The people who kill organizations are your B players.”
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Escalate True Misalignment
“Recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. … No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.”
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“If you read any management textbook, it says 'don't hire the divas' … But the people who are the divas … are the ones who will drive the culture and company to excellence … they drive people hard, they're controversial, and they care passionately.”
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Let Chaos Reign, Then Rein in Chaos
“…you needed to let chaos reign in order to explore your alternatives… you must rein in chaos.”
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Invert, Always Invert
“The great algebraist, Jacobi… was known for his constant repetition of one phrase: 'Invert, always invert.'”
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Two Tests for Specific Knowledge
“Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.”
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Rule 13
“When placed in command, take charge.”
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Validate on Real Users
“One of the most common traps in product is to believe that we can anticipate our customer's actual response to our products.”
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Plans Are Guesses
“Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.”
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Planning Is Guessing
“Planning is guessing.”
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Roadmaps as Root Cause
“Typical roadmaps are the root cause of most waste and failed efforts in product organizations.”
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Why The Initial Plan Doesn't Matter
“A startup's initial business plan doesn't matter that much, because it is very hard to determine up front exactly what combination of product and market will result in success.”
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Fear Invites Wrong Figures
“Fear invites wrong figures. Bearers of bad news fare badly. To keep his job, anyone may present to his boss only good news.”
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Growth and Comfort Don't Coexist
“Growth and comfort don't coexist. That's true for people, for companies, for nations.”
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Customers Can't Predict Themselves
“I do not believe that any amount of market research could have told us that the Sony Walkman would be successful, not to say a sensational hit that would spawn many imitators.”
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Healthy Fear and Conviction
“Every morning you've got to wake up with a healthy fear that the world is changing, and a conviction that, to win, you have to change faster and be more agile than anyone else.”
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Love or Hate
“A well-designed product is one you fall in love with. Or you hate. It may be polarizing, but it has to provoke a real reaction.”
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Learn From Them
“I don't know if consumers know what they want. But we can learn from them.”