The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going.

Ideas can be willed, and the imagination is their engine.

You want to dig your well where you have the best chance of finding water with the least amount of digging

Organizations exist to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.

Organizations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.

A powerful force drives the world toward a converging commonality, and that force is technology. … Almost everyone everywhere wants all the things they have heard about, seen, or experienced via the new technologies.

The fact that a consistendy highly creative person is generally irresponsible in the sense that we have used this term is in part predictable from what is known about the freewheeling fantasies of very young children.

Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress.

One should not focus on the differences between people but look for commonality and similarity.

Ideas are useless unless used.

Experience comes from what we have done. Wisdom comes from what we have done badly.

The trouble with much of the advice business is getting today about the need to be more vigorously creative is, essentially, that its advocates have generally failed to distinguish between the relatively easy process of being creative in the abstract and the infinitely more difficult process of being innovationist in the concrete.

Anything in excess is a poison.

Sustained success is largely a matter of focusing regularly on the right things and making a lot of uncelebrated little improvements every day.

Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want to buy a quarter-inch hole!