Cool Innovations Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Cool Innovations. Here they are! All 43 of them:

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.
Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince)
Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, "Does it do [x]?", "Do you plan to add [y]?". Finally Jobs said, "Wait wait — put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don't want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.
Derek Sivers
There's a huge misconception that innovation is mostly about inventing or coming up with cool new things. More often than not, innovation is about figuring out what people really need or want but can't have or afford.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
Web directories, which featured human-assembled lists and categories of cool sites, and Web rings, which created through a common navigation bar a circle of related sites that were linked to one another.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
What’s more, according to Brown’s research, play shapes our brain, fosters empathy, helps us navigate complex social groups, and is at the core of creativity and innovation. In some ways, it helps our overheated brain cool down.
Brené Brown (Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.)
Is it weird that when I see a cool t shirt or pick up a toothbrush or see a new car I don't think about the product itself? I think about the thousands of people and dollars to make it. I think about how the retailer that took the risk to buy and resell it. Then I work backwards to the store costs, the distributer who got it there, the shipping company that brought it over from China, the factory workers that made it, the people that sourced the materials and the people that harvested the raw materials, and on and on.. . The global economy is amazing. Your $20 t-shirt is a freaking miracle.
Richie Norton
And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.
Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince)
We want to allow millions of small businesses to accept credit cards for the first time, so we have to make it easy to sign up. We need easy sign-up, so we have to design simple software and eliminate paper contracts. We have millions of people signing up, so we have to keep our customer service costs down. We need to keep customer service costs down, so we have to have simple pricing, and net settlements, and no hidden fees, and no paper contracts. We need to have a low price, so we have to save money on advertising, so we have to have an amazing product, and hardware so cool that people talk about it, and a product that they can explain without our help.
Jim McKelvey (The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time)
As entrepreneurs, product managers, developers, and designers, we love to spend our time coming up with cool new feature ideas and designing great user experiences. However, those items sit at the top two levels of the pyramid of user needs. First and foremost, the product needs to be available when the user wants to use it. After that, the product's response time needs to be fast enough to be deemed adequate. The next tier pertains to the product's quality: Does it work as it is supposed to? We then arrive at the feature set tier, which deals with functionality. At the top, we have user experience (UX) design, which governs how easy—and hopefully how enjoyable—your product is to use. As with Maslow's hierarchy, lower-level needs have to be met before higher-level needs matter.
Dan Olsen (The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback)
Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks). 9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).
Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
Seeking to create a high-productivity space for commercial innovation, Probst conceived the “Action Office,” whose surfaces, both horizontal and vertical, allowed for clear thought, freedom of movement, ample storage, and the ability to lay out plans and drawings (there were no personal computers back then), all in a semi-open, semi-private configuration. Sadly, as is the fate of many creative architects, he watched as his modular workplace morphed into an economic convenience for the companies for which they worked, in which creative space gave way to an ice-cube tray-like formation, and the priority shifted away from ergonomic needs to economic ones.
Steve Prentice (Cool Down: Getting Further by Going Slower)
Uses of Customized Blinds Custom blinds will also be used to manage the temperature in any room. As an illustration, if the room in a home is cold through the day time, the owner of the home and their family members can easily open up the blinds so that they'll let the daylight in. The daylight helps to heat up the room with out altering the temperature on the wall. Additionally, when it gets too scorching, the family can shut the blinds in order that they can cool the room down as properly. Regardless of the scenario, these blinds can be utilized for all kinds of different purposes. Window blinds right now can be found in quite a few colours, materials and magnificence. Getting a perfect window blind will rely in your style. Aside from decoration, the window shades serve many functions in properties. They prevent excess light from coming through windows, they provide us with privateness and they're also appropriate to manage temperature. In cold seasons they forestall heat from getting out of the home. Buying the perfect varieties of window blinds can change your complete looks of your own home and make it attractive. Vertical blinds are among the most unique sorts of window blinds you can get. They're good insulators and can be utilized to utterly Blinds Sutherland Shire block daylight penetration. The vertical shades are also strong sufficient to prevent any damage from strong winds. They're low-cost however trendy. Some are constructed with the ability to adjust themselves according to the time of day. Customs blinds can be used for both informal and office settings. This innovative idea means that you can use images as blind. In the case of makes use of of customized blinds, there are different options. Using your personal creativeness, customized blinds will be embellished with completely different colours, designs and patterns. If your window is of an additional strange size, there are traditional window blinds which might be customized to slot in. These are the roller blinds. Resulting from technology, they have been superior to be extra dependable and sturdy than before. They're now less more likely to breakdown. You can select from all kinds of colours and patterns. Earlier than coming to a conclusion on one of the best kinds of window blinds, it is important to do some in depth analysis. Custom blinds act as a fantastic reward in your loved ones. It's a present that can be cherished and remembered for a number of years. It is unique from normal gifts, the recipient will be glad about the trouble and thought you will have invested into it. When you parents have passion for grandchildren, think about having your children printed onto a blind and giving it to them. They may merely adore the photograph of their grandchildren, as well as having a new blind to boost the look of their residence.
Edward Cullen
Uses of Custom Blinds Customized blinds may also be used to control the temperature in any room. For example, if the room in a home is chilly during the day time, the owner of the house and their family members can simply open up the blinds so that they'll let the sunlight in. The daylight helps to heat up the room without changing the temperature on the wall. Additionally, when it will get too sizzling, the household can shut the blinds so that they can cool the room down as nicely. Whatever the scenario, these blinds can be utilized for a wide variety of various purposes. Out there, there are various kinds of window shades. Choosing the right window blind is usually a bit hectic if it’s your first time. Listed below are some various varieties of window shades that you can choose from. Venetian blinds are the commonest and in style at this time. They're constructed from horizontal slates connected to one another. They function on a change or pull string. Some are product of wooden, plastic or composites. They are appropriate for each houses and places of work. Vertical blinds are among the most unique varieties of window blinds you can get. They are good insulators and can be used to Custom Blinds utterly block daylight penetration. The vertical shades are also robust enough to stop any harm from strong winds. They are low cost but stylish. Some are constructed with the power to adjust themselves in response to the time of day. Customs blinds can be used for each casual and office settings. This innovative thought means that you can use pictures as blind. With regards to makes use of of custom blinds, there are different options. Using your individual imagination, customized blinds might be adorned with completely different colors, designs and patterns. If your window is of an additional ordinary size, there are basic window blinds which can be customized to slot in. These are the roller blinds. Attributable to know-how, they've been advanced to be extra reliable and durable than earlier than. They're now less likely to breakdown. You possibly can select from all kinds of colours and patterns. Before coming to a conclusion on the perfect kinds of window blinds, it is very important do some extensive research. The images can be printed on a high quality curler and you should utilize vertical blinds, that are fade resistant, easier to clean and final for a number of years. In case your home windows varies in sizes, contemplate the images that will look one of the best. For a big window, a large panorama image can be effective. If the window is kind of slim, you need to consider photos corresponding to flowers or bushes.
Edwin Hall
Do you ever see someone doing something cool and you say to yourself, "I could do that" ... And then you don't? Ask yourself, why not? Honestly, why not? You really may not have a reason to do it, but if you'd regret not doing it? That's a whole other story.
Richie Norton
Note to businesspersons and salespersons: "Be professional" does not mean "be a robot." Just be friendly and act like a real person. Cool?
Richie Norton
For some time now, the conventional wisdom at most agencies has been to partner with experts in specific fields—social networking, gaming, mobile, or any other discipline—in order to “get the best people for the job.” But given the success of AKQA, R/GA, and so many other innovators, perhaps it can be argued that to be truly holistic in our approach, it’s better to grow innovations from one’s own stem cells, so to speak, than to try to graft on capabilities on an ad-hoc basis. Some would no doubt argue that it makes the most economic sense to hire experts to execute as needed, rather than taking on more overhead in an increasingly competitive marketplace. But it should be pointed out that it’s hard to have the original ideas themselves if your own team doesn’t have a firm grasp of the technologies. Without a cross-disciplinary team of in-house experts, who knows what opportunities you—and by extension, your clients—may miss. “It comes down to the brains that you have working with you to make it a reality,” John Butler, cofounder of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, tells me. “The history of the ad agency is the Bernbach model—the writer and art director sitting in a room together coming up with an idea,” he says, referring to legendary adman Bill Bernbach, cofounder of DDB and the man who first combined copywriters and art directors as two-person teams. Now, all that’s changed. “[Today, there are] fifteen people sitting in a room. Media is as much a part of the creative department as a writer or an art director. And we have account planners—we call them ‘connection planners’—in the room throwing around ideas,” he says. “That facilitates getting to work that is about the experience, about ways to compel consumers to interact with your brand in a way that they become like free media” by actively promoting the brand for you. If his team worked on the old Bernbach model, Butler adds, they would never have created something like those cool MINI billboards that display messages to drivers by name that I described in the last chapter. The idea actually spun out of a discussion about 3-D glasses for print ads. “Someone in the interactive group said, ‘We can probably do that same thing with [radio frequency identification] technology.’” By using transmitters built into the billboards, and building RFID chips into MINI key fobs, “when a person drives by, it will recognize him and it will spit out a message just for him.” He adds with considerable understatement: “Through having those capabilities, in-house engineers, technical guys who know the technology and what’s available, we were able to create something that was really pretty cool.
Rick Mathieson (The On-Demand Brand: 10 Rules for Digital Marketing Success in an Anytime, Everywhere World)
Here’s hoping NASCAR officials and teams decide to do some new and cool things rather than the old and slow things. I hope NASCAR gets kids everywhere excited about innovating in automotive design, so that we can go farther on less fuel or even no fuel—just electrons—so that car exhaust is cleaner or nonexistent, so that we can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and make a better planet for all of us,
Bill Nye (Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World)
Relentless Innovation author Jeffrey Phillips favors a possibly apocryphal line from Einstein. The story is that Einstein was asked how he would tackle a particularly tough problem—saving the world, in some tellings—if he had only an hour to do so.6 Einstein’s approach? He’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes solving it. That is, Phillips says, just about the opposite of what executives normally do. He paints a picture of harried execs deciding immediately on a solution, launching into its implementation, and then cooling down with email. It’s all task, task, task—symptomatic of a work culture that’s getting too busy to innovate, that’s become infatuated with efficiency. We might be doing with our time, but are we developing?
Faisal Hoque (Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability)
Having a child has become a prodigiously artificial thing. It no longer has anything of the passionately accidental event about it; it has become the parthenogenetic fruit of a calculation of biological, dietary and psychosocial data and you wonder to what extent dream, desire or fatality are still involved. But perhaps the race is losing its interest in sexuality, preferring instead a sort of protozoan transplantation. Leaving out of account that what has been conceived by artificial insemination is very likely to continue its life in artificial intelligence and to die of built-in obsolescence. After the mechanical bride, the mechanical widow. Now every human being is the product of a sexual act, a sexual pact or else we should not be the human race. It takes a sexual copulation successfully to produce a human being, just as, among the Hindus, it takes a copulation between the word and silence for a sacrifice to be successfully carried out. In a sense the child is indeed the continuation of the species. But in another, he or she is a biological vestige of it. The further we go with change, genetic innovations and fashion, the more unreal it becomes, with each new generation, to put our trust in the processes of childbirth and organic growth. The simplicity and slowness of those things are entirely outside the range of our contemporary experience. How can we claim to exercise judgement if we have lost a sense of punishment? How can we claim to judge anything at all if we no longer accept being judged? And if we are no longer able either to judge or be judged, then we lose all hope of being absolved or condemned in the past or the future. Now, what can no longer be reflected in the past or the future takes place in a single instant with all its consequences. The Last Judgement becomes an immediate reality. We have right here before us the unchecked proliferation in epidemic proportions of all processes, the multiplication of all cancers on an epidemic scale.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
The actions of an entrepreneurial firm can actually drive change, sometimes supplying that missing element. In other words, leaping can cause you to grow wings. In Square’s case, our big missing element was permission from the card networks. We actively pursued this change, aided by a system that was already fully functional, if not legal. Had we not already built the system, Mastercard and Visa probably never would have bothered to rewrite their rules. Even if they had, they might have written the new rules in a way that would still prevent Square from functioning as it did. Our system gave them something to aim for. Once Mastercard agreed to revise its regulations, the tone of our conversations was basically, “Square is cool, so how do we make it compliant?
Jim McKelvey (The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time)
Leucate. Same parish priest, same church. The great local innovation is Communion under the two species. If the faithful are reluctant to drink from the same chalice, God will not hold it against them. They can always dip their host in the priest's wine. All this new ritual passes over the heads of the general run of worshippers. Homily on the Covenant struck with Moses, then sealed in the blood of Christ, and then in the Eucharist. Only Christ washes away spiritual stains. Silence falls. There then enters a person who could well be the village whore - a blonde creature in a pale green miniskirt and with a boldly plunging neckline. She slips quietly into the Lady Chapel, lights a candle for the Virgin Mary, then prostrates herself in prayer in a dark side-chapel before leaving again unseen. The Holy Covenant remains the one between the people of the village.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004)
Menlo has won awards for being among the most innovative, democratic, creative, and cool places to work. It even was honored by the American Psychological Association for having one of the most “psychologically healthy” workplaces. It’s also making money.
Brigid Schulte (Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time)
Almost every child will complain about their parents sometimes. It is natural, because when people stay together for a long time, they will start to have argument. But ignore about the unhappy time, our parents love us all the time. No matter what happen to us, they will stand by our sides. We should be grateful to them and try to understand them. 카톡☎ppt33☎ 〓 라인☎pxp32☎ 홈피는 친추로 연락주세요 Nowadays, more and more middle-aged people are suffering from insomnia, as life for the middle-aged is stressful indeed. For one thing, as they are the backbones of their companies, they have plenty of things to do at work. And they usually have to work overtime. For another, they have to take great responsibilities at home, for their aged parents need to be supported and their little children need to be brought up. That's why they don't have enough time to have a good rest. 비맥스판매,비맥스파는곳,비맥스구입방법,비맥스구매방법,비맥스구입사이트,비맥스구매사이트,비맥스판매사이트,비맥스후기 I have a dream. When I grow up, I want to be an actor. Being an actor can play many roles and experience different lifestyles. It is so cool. What’s more, I can make a lot of money and then travel around the world. I have passion in performance and have joined many dramas. I hope someday I can realize my dream. Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here? The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.
비맥스구입사이트 via2.co.to 카톡:ppt33 비맥스판매 비맥스팝니다 비맥스구입방법 비맥스구매방법 비맥스복용법
The Korean wave of popular culture is called “Hallyu.” You should learn the word, since you’ll be seeing a lot of it. U.S. President Barack Obama referred to it during a March 2012 visit to South Korea, in the context of discussing the nation’s technical and pop culture innovations. He said: “It’s no wonder so many people around the world have caught the Korean Wave—Hallyu.
Euny Hong (The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture)
heart, it’s driven by a deep human desire for collaboration and a deep human desire for recognition and affirmation of work well done—not financial reward. It is amazing how much value you can create with the words “Hey, what you added is really cool. Nice job. Way to go!” Millions of hours of free labor are being unlocked by tapping into people’s innate desires to innovate, share, and be recognized for it.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
DHL covered each package in thermoactive foil. The foil was cooled down below the freezing point, turning the package jet black. So the competitors picked up a large, black package without any reason for alarm. But when temperatures rose, the specialized packaging turned bright yellow, with bold red lettering that read, “DHL IS FASTER.” Before long, competitors were toting around bright packages in DHL’s corporate colors that alerted the public who was the best choice for shipping.
Josh Linkner (Hacking Innovation: The New Growth Model from the Sinister World of Hackers)
pastors in churches with a strong evangelistic or innovative bent (among whom I count myself) to claim that they don’t like to be around Christians. One pastor recently told me that he didn’t want any Christians coming to his new church plant. He only wanted non-Christians searching for God, and new Christians who’d recently come to Christ. On one hand, I understand where he’s coming from. He’s tired of dealing with small-minded traditionalists who want to maintain a historical preservation society more than fulfill the mission. But on the other hand, I fear for the unintended consequences of his outlook. If he’s only going to reach out to non-Christians and nurture new Christians, what’s he going to do when those new Christians become plain ol’ Christians, the kind he hates to be around? His patience and compassion flow easily toward people caught in the addictive clutches of sin. He thinks the rough language and butchered theology of a new Christian is cool, sort of like the cute things little kids say and do. But two or three years later his patience runs thin and the compassion runs dry when he realizes that these cute new Christians are still dealing with the same old issues. At that point he leaves the “slow growers” to fend for themselves. Many quietly make their way out the back door, though he never seems to notice in the excitement of all the new folks coming through the front door.
Larry Osborne (Sticky Church (Leadership Network Innovation Series Book 6))
And yet the world’s greenhouse gas emissions probably dropped just 5 percent, and possibly less than that. What’s remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little. This small decline in emissions is proof that we cannot get to zero emissions simply—or even mostly—by flying and driving less. Just as we needed new tests, treatments, and vaccines for the novel coronavirus, we need new tools for fighting climate change: zero-carbon ways to produce electricity, make things, grow food, keep our buildings cool and warm, and move people and goods around the world. And we need new seeds and other innovations to help the world’s poorest people—many of whom are smallholder farmers—adapt to a warmer climate.
Bill Gates (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need)
As adults, we can also protect ourselves from vulnerability with cool. We worry about being perceived as laughing too loud, buying in, caring too much, being too eager. We don’t wear hoodies as often, but we can use our titles, education, background, and positions as handles on the shields of criticism, cynicism, cool, and cruelty: I can talk to you this way or blow you off because of who I am or what I do for a living. And, make no mistake, when it comes to this shield, handles are also fashioned out of nonconformity and rejection of traditional status markers: I dismiss you because you’ve sold out and you spend your life in a cubicle or I’m more relevant and interesting because I rejected the trappings of higher education, traditional employment, etc. DARING GREATLY: TIGHTROPE WALKING, PRACTICING SHAME RESILIENCE, AND REALITY CHECKING Over the course of one year, I interviewed artists, writers, innovators, business leaders, clergy, and community leaders about these issues, and how they stayed open to the constructive (albeit difficult-to-hear) criticism while filtering out the mean-spirited attacks.
Brené Brown (Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead)
The easiest way to describe how to harness the galvanizing power of why is with a tool I call the belief statement. For example, most of Apple’s product launches in recent years feature slick videos with commentary from Apple designers, engineers, and executives. These videos, while camouflaged as beautiful product showcases, are actually packed with statements not about what the products do but about the design thinking behind them: in essence, the tightly held beliefs with which Apple’s design team operates. We believe our users should be at the center of everything we do. We believe that a piece of technology should be as beautiful as it is functional. We believe that making devices thinner and lighter but more powerful requires innovative problem solving. Belief statements like these are so compelling for two reasons. First, the right corporate or organizational beliefs have the ability to resonate with our personal belief systems and feelings, and move us to action. In fact, the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand study revealed that nearly two out of three people are now belief-driven buyers.4 And as we saw in our discussion of buyers’ emotional motivators in chapter 3, this works even if the beliefs stated are aspirational. For example, if my vision for my future self is someone who weighs a few pounds less and is in better physical shape, a well-timed ad from a health club or fancy kitchen blender evangelizing the benefits of a healthy lifestyle may be enough to rapidly convert me. In the case of Apple, the same phenomenon results in mobs of smitten consumers arriving at stores in droves, braving long lines and paying premium prices, as if to say, “Yes! I do believe I should be at the center of everything you do! Technology should be beautiful! Thinner? Lighter? More powerful? Of course! We share the same vision! We’re both cool!” (Although these actual words are rarely spoken aloud.) The second reason belief statements are so compelling is because they help us manifest the conviction and emotion critical to delivering our message in an authentic way.
David Priemer (Sell the Way You Buy: A Modern Approach To Sales That Actually Works (Even On You!))
We have a tradition of creativity—we really value it. For us, it’s all about riding that line between creativity and Clarity. We’ve got teams that move very quickly and customers asking for all kinds of new work, and we say, “Yes, we can do all that amazing and cool work.” But there’s a massive need for us to be able to deliver quality product. The process to drive quality can be frustrating. When we introduce a new framework to ensure quality, instead of asking creative questions and what we could do that is cool, fancy, and shiny, you have to spend time thinking about the framework and how to use it. At first, that is frustrating, but—and this has made the difference—as people get used to the framework, they don’t have to think about it anymore and they can be even more creative.
Karin Hurt (Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates)
Like any company, we have a corporate culture formed not only by our intentions but also as a result of our history. For Amazon, that history is fairly fresh and, fortunately, it includes several examples of tiny seeds growing into big trees. We have many people at our company who have watched multiple $10 million seeds turn into billion dollar businesses. That first-hand experience and the culture that has grown up around those successes is, in my opinion, a big part of why we can start businesses from scratch. The culture demands that these new businesses be high potential and that they be innovative and differentiated, but it does not demand that they be large on the day that they are born. I remember how excited we were in 1996 as we crossed $10 million in book sales. It wasn’t hard to be excited—we had grown to $10 million from zero. Today, when a new business inside Amazon grows to $10 million, the overall company is growing from $10 billion to $10.01 billion. It would be easy for the senior executives who run our established billion dollar businesses to scoff. But they don’t. They watch the growth rates of the emerging businesses and send emails of congratulations. That’s pretty cool, and we’re proud it’s a part of our culture.
Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
But cacti know the real trick. Sometime in the last 35 million years, they rolled up their primordial leaves into spines, the most daring fashion accessory of the season. Multipurpose, too: a useful defense against nibblers, and a kind of sunshade and air-conditioning system in one. In the absence of leaves, photosynthesis moved to the green, leathery skin. Here another innovation took place: cacti learned to keep their pores (known as stomata) closed during the day, to prevent moisture from siphoning away into the unforgiving sky. They open their pores only during the cool hours of the night, squirreling away pockets of carbon dioxide, and complete the task of making sugar during the day. They also store water under their waxy skins and quickly grow networks of tiny roots after rain to siphon up moisture. One good storm can sustain a cactus through several years of drought. For all this, cacti can be extravagant too, coming out in showy blossoms in shades of cerise, gold, and crimson as gaudy as any high school prom dress. Clover and Jotter couldn’t have known all this (the details of cactus photosynthesis wouldn’t be worked out for decades). But in cataloging plants that thrived in extremes, they were adding to the general picture of evolution and adaptation, tracing the subtle threads of a tapestry that had been in the making for 3.5 billion years.
Melissa L. Sevigny (Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon)
The Pentagram, a symbol of five points, stands as an eternal testament to the profound interconnection of all things. Each point signifies the fundamental elements of existence - earth, air, fire, water, and spirit. It is a cosmic diagram reminding us that as humans, we are not separate entities in an indifferent universe, but rather integral parts of a grand, interconnected cosmic dance. The element of earth represents the physical realm, our bodies, and the tangible world around us. It reminds us of our mortal nature, our connection to the mother Earth, and the grounding force that allows us to grow and prosper. Air, the breath of life, signifies the realm of intellect, communication, and thought. It is the invisible force that fuels our creative and innovative abilities, allowing us to soar towards our highest aspirations. Fire symbolizes passion, energy, and transformation. It is the spark of life within us, the burning desire to grow, evolve, and reach beyond the realms of the possible. Yet, it also serves as a reminder of the transformative power of trials and tribulations, refining us like gold in a crucible. Water relates to emotions, intuition, and the depths of the subconscious. It is the wellspring of our feelings, our dreams, our hopes, and our fears. Water teaches us the power of adaptability, the beauty of depth, and the strength in gentleness. Finally, the fifth point, spirit, represents the divine essence that permeates all things. It is the invisible thread that weaves together the fabric of the universe, the divine spark within each of us, connecting us to each other and to the cosmos. The Pentagram, therefore, is not merely a symbol. It is a philosophical compass, a map of our spiritual journey. It reminds us to remain grounded, yet to let our thoughts soar; to burn with passion, yet to cool with compassion; to dive deep within ourselves, yet to connect to the divine within all. It is a reminder that we are born of the cosmos, and to the cosmos, we shall return - a testament to the spiritual cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. In this dance of existence, we are not solitary dancers, but part of a divine choreography, intricately woven into the fabric of the universe.
D.L. Lewis
This problem was in the mind of actor/playwright/producer Steele MacKaye when he took over the lease of the bankrupt Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1879. A true Renaissance man and a Paris-trained actor, MacKaye had been a fixture of the New York theater scene since 1872, achieving a notable measure of success both on and off the stage. And when some private investors gave him the opportunity to build a stock company of his own, in a built-to-order theater, spending whatever he liked and making whatever improvements he wanted, he jumped at the chance. Over the next year, the Fifth Avenue was completely remodeled. It opened at the beginning of 1880, renamed the Madison Square Theatre, a resplendent 650-seat jewel box of a playhouse that featured such MacKaye-devised innovations as a double-height elevator stage that could make scene shifts in less than a minute, fold-up seats, a Tiffany-designed interior … and, for the
Salvatore Basile (Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything)
Manufacturers agency costs and, 46-50 characteristics of, 3 custom products and, 6, 14, 15, 33 innovation and, 13-15, 121-131, 147-164 dimensions-of-merit product improvements and, 146 expectations of economic benefit by, 2-9, 33, 51-52, 56 free revealing and, 9, 10, 80 government policy and, 2, 107, 108, 117-119 information asymmetries of, 8, 9, 70-72 innovation and, 1-3, 6-9, 14-17, 27, 33, 37, 45, 49-52, 56, 70-76, 107-119, 133, 136, 147-164, 174 lead users and, 4, 5, 27, 127, 133-136, 144-146 national competitive advantage and, 170-172 social welfare and, 7-13 transaction costs and, 55-57 innovate-or-buy decisions and, 6, 7 Marketing research, 15, 16, 37, 133, 134, 167 Marples, D., 63 Martin, J., 150 Marwell, G., 90 Mathews, J., 25 Maurer, S., 115 McAdam, D., 90 McCool, Rob, 101 Mead, L., 152 Means, R., 56 Meckling, W., 6, 46 Merges, Robert, 113, 114 Merton, Robert, 168 Meyer, M., 99 Microsoft, 13, 128, 151 Midgely, David, 23, 179 Mishina, K., 79 MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 97, 98 Mitchell, R., 40 Molin, M., 129 Mollick, Ethan, 131 Morrison, Pamela, 4, 10, 20, 23-27, 34, 35, 79, 136-143, 179 Mountain biking, 20, 34-37, 72-75, 94 Muniz, A., 174 Nagata, A., 84 Narver, J., 144 National competitive advantage, 170-172. See also Government policy Nelson, R., 68, 84, 113, 114, 170 Niedner, S., 8, 60 Nuvolari, A., 10, 78, 79 Ogawa, S., 8, 71, 72, 108 O’Guinn, T., 174 Oliver, P., 90 Olson, E., 144 Olson, M., 89, 90 Open source software. See also Free software communities and, 172, 174 innovation and, 97-102, 126, 129-132 free revealing and, 9-11, 80, 86, 87 innovation communities and, 11, 93, 96-102, 111, 113, 124, 126, 129-132, 172, 181 intellectual commons and, 115-117 intellectual property rights and, 9, 10, 115-117 knowledge and, 169, 170 Ostrom, E., 90 Outdoor products, 20, 21 Patents. See Intellectual property rights
Eric von Hippel (Democratizing Innovation)
There is not a scientist on earth today who can fully explain and replicate the flight efficiency of a single insect or the swimming ability of any fish. No man-made pump and piping can match the efficiency of the human heart and vascular system. Globally, we devote huge amounts of energy to cool our computers, yet nature's super-computer, the human brain, has not heating problem at all. As we'll see repeatedly throughout this book, nature always uses the least energy and the least materials for the job. Nature and humans use dramatically opposed strategies for drag reduction and neither borrows from the other.
Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
Horseradish Schnapps You need fresh horseradish root for this liquor. Jarred prepared horseradish is too finely grated, which tends to make the spirit overly cloudy. It also contains trace amounts of vinegar, oil, and salt, which would affect the clean, clear flavor. Whole horseradish root has practically no aroma, but when it is grated, the broken cells produce mustard oil (horseradish and mustard belong to the same botanical family), which irritates your mucous membranes. The membranes weep to rid your system of the irritating oil, producing a cleansing effect throughout your skull. That effect, though moderately painful, is wonderfully refreshing. Makes 1 pint Ingredients 1 fifth (750 ml/31⁄4 cups) vodka (80–100 proof) 11⁄2 cups coarsely shredded fresh horseradish root Instructions Combine the vodka and horseradish in a half-gallon jar. Stir to moisten the horseradish. Seal the jar and put it in a cool, dark cabinet until the liquid smells and tastes strongly of horseradish, 2 to 4 hours. Strain the mixture with a mesh strainer lined with several layers of dampened cheesecloth into a clean quart jar. Do not push on the solids to extract more liquid. Seal and store in a cool, dark cabinet. Use within 1 year. Note: The liqueur will precipitate small bits of horseradish as it sits. These are not harmful, but you might find them unattractive. To cleanse your Horseradish Schnapps, follow the directions for clarifying (see page 8).
Andrew Schloss (Homemade Liqueurs and Infused Spirits: Innovative Flavor Combinations, Plus Homemade Versions of Kahlúa, Cointreau, and Other Popular Liqueurs)
Several of her students were engrossed in their work, but when she asked one of them, a PhD student named David Merrill, to give me a quick demo of his project, he readily agreed. Merrill walked us over to a three-foot-wide mockup of a supermarket shelf stocked with cartons of butter, Egg Beaters, and cereal, and he happily slipped on a Bluetooth-enabled ring he had been tinkering with when we interrupted him. He pointed directly at a box of cereal, and a light on the shelf directly below it glowed red. This meant, he told us, that the food didn’t fit the nutritional profile that he had programmed into the device. Perhaps it contained nuts or not enough fiber. He told me that there were a lot of “really cool technologies” making this happen—an infrared transmitter/receiver mounted on the ring, a transponder on the shelf with which it communicated, and a Bluetooth connection to a smart phone that could access the wearer’s profile in real time, to name a few. It was easy to see how this “augmented reality interface,” as Merrill called it, could change the experience of in-store shopping in truly a profound way. But what really impressed me during this visit was the close working relationship he clearly enjoyed with Maes. He called her “Pattie,” and my impression was that they engaged in give-and-take like true collaborators and colleagues.
Frank Moss (The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives)
Kim Jong-il also invented the hamburger. Almost touchingly, North Koreans have a lot of pride in their heritage, though it’s for absurd reasons. The few foreigners who have been permitted to tour North Korea report bizarre trivia passed on to them by some pretty unironic local tour guides: Koreans are such a glorious race that they created not only the world’s great technological innovations but also the spoon. Though
Euny Hong (The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture)
MacroAir EnergyLogic HVLS ceiling fans will suit your commercial or industrial space, whether it's an garage, warehouse, hangar, gymnasium, or auditorium. EnergyLogic is a manufacturer, seller, and innovator of environmentally friendly heating and cooling products, providing thoughtful, customized solutions geared to the individual needs of independent garages and car dealerships, as well as a variety of industrial, commercial, and agricultural companies. We combine best-in-class waste oil heating and big HVLS fan products with in-house support and a national network of experts, providing customers with the equipment and custom solutions they need to harness onsite energy and reduce costs and dependency on conventional energy. To us “warmth” and “comfort” are not just words to describe the benefits of our products, but also the qualities we bring to every transaction and every relationship. Search us online using this phrase: Macroair Energylogic
Macroair Energylogic
Is Willis Carrier an anomaly or not? The question has real political and social stakes, because the doxa of market capitalism as an unparalleled innovation engine has long leaned on stories like Willis Carrier’s miraculous cooling device as a cornerstone of its faith.6 In many respects, these beliefs made sense, because the implicit alternatives were the planned economies of socialism and communism. State-run economies were fundamentally hierarchies, not networks. They consolidated decision-making power in a top-down command system, which meant that new ideas had to be approved by the authorities before they could begin to spread through the society. Markets, by contrast, allowed good ideas to erupt anywhere in the system. In modern tech-speak, markets allowed innovation to flourish at the edges of the network. Planned economies were more like the old mainframe computer systems that predated the Internet, where every participant had to get authorization from a central machine to do new work. When Friedrich von Hayek launched his influential argument in the 1940s about the importance of price signals in market economies, he was observing a related phenomenon: the decentralized pricing mechanism of the marketplace allows an entrepreneur to gauge the relative value of his or her innovation. If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don’t need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it. Entire institutions and legal frameworks—not to mention a vast tower of conventional wisdom—have been built around the Carrier model of innovation. But what if he’s the exception and not the rule?
Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From)