Watkins Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Watkins. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Every mother should be a true artist, who knows how to weave into her child's life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems - the poetry of a true and noble life.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.
James N. Watkins
A promise unkept will take a man's mind.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our lives against that which we thought it would be by now.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
Sometimes love is a wound that opens and closes, opens and closes, all our lives.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
You don't love people," he said. "You love what they do to you.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
But life doesn't turn out the way you expect. Ever. - Iris from What Comes After
Steve Watkins
Did you know, young lady," said Watkin to her, "that the Book of Revelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the Divine, as you know. To me it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off, doesn't it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you're killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair.
Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1))
The sooner that Layla understands that we are nothing but the sum of that which we endure, the better.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
Now, I've made mistakes. I've lost people. But you've thrown them away. There is an important difference.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
His cigarettes helped mark the passage of time, especially on days that seemed all sun and sky...The dependable dwindling of his cigarette supply reassured him that he hadn't been left out here, that eventually he would have to ride into town and things would still be there, that the world hadn't stopped whirling.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
Luz, we all have an obligation to the people who love us. They've given us this gift whether we want it or not and it is our duty to stand up and be worthy. We are not loved in proportion to our deserving, and thank God for that, for unworthies like you and me would find that life a bitch. We're loved to the level we ought to rise, and even in returning it we are obligated to be gentle.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
To be successful, you need to mobilize the energy of many others in your organization. If you do the right things, then your vision, your expertise, and your drive can propel you forward and serve as seed crystals.
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
It’s only religion. Faith is faith, but religions are no better than the people who practise them.
Phil Rickman (A Crown of Lights (Merrily Watkins, #3))
What is so incredible and essential about an authentic cultural scene is it rejects a value system based on consumption and productivity and instead celebrates creation, critical thought, aesthetics and expression. That can’t be mass marketed.
Claire Vaye Watkins
Don’t you ‘baby’ me, you backwoods barbarian. I'm not settling for bringing you pie and beer for the rest of my life. I have plans. They don’t include marriage to you.
Virginia Nelson
The true source of economic security is self-reliance and economic freedom—Social Security is immoral because it subverts both.
Don Watkins (Rooseveltcare: How Social Security is Sabotaging the Land of Self Reliance)
He loved her as though it had never occurred to him that he could feel otherwise. She wanted to be someone who deserved a love like that.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
Don't diss the caterpillar and then sweat it when it starts to turn into a beautiful butterfly.
Jessica N. Watkins (Secrets of a Side Bitch 4)
What was attraction if not a form of telepathy? The wild luck of two people feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time. That word again: purpose.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
Intense love is often akin to intense suffering.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Collected Works of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper)
He was no Tin Man—he had a heart. And it belonged to Georgiana Watkins.
Lauren Layne (Walk of Shame (Love Unexpectedly, #4))
On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. “Are you?
Tess Gunty (The Rabbit Hutch)
(Frances Ellen Watkins Harper) "In closing, Harper challenged the white women in the audience to stand by their black sisters, to look beyond their own white privilege. “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs,” she reminded them. “Talk of giving women the ballot-box? … While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.
Kate Clifford Larson (Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero)
In the silence, I could hear the distinct sound of goats maa-ing in the barn. Lying there listening to them made me smile, too. I'd always loved goats - every one of them different from every other one, and all of them goofy and playful.
Steve Watkins (What Comes After)
No, Mo," Miss Watkins said, turning to Nesta who was crying with laughter. "Nesta Williams, seeing as you clearly find it so funny. What do you think the name of God might be?" "Er, not sure," said Nesta, looking caught out. "What do you think?" "I don't think," said Miss Watkins."I know." "I don't think I know either," giggled Nesta. The whole class got detention, but it was worth it. I felt like i'd spent the whole morning laughing my head off We never did get to know what God's name was.
Cathy Hopkins
As a writer, I will go down any dark alley, inch my way through the tightest crawl space, and feed on your every fear. I will take your sense of calm and tear it to shreds. - Horror Author Barbara Watkins
Barbara Watkins (Hollowing Screams)
Four days ago, I realized that being alone was better than living every day lonely with him.
Jessica N. Watkins (Secrets of a Side Bitch)
I don't know, maybe it's easier to be lost than found. At least there's energy in lostness. Something to be done.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
Our Country is Gone, our cause is lost
Sam R. Watkins (Co. Aytch: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War)
Match Strategy to Situation
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
Luz’s father had had it; it was how he kept himself atop everyone around him. He believed harder in stupider things, and there was somehow authority in this.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
Being a leader is hard; being an honest one harder still
David B. Watkins (Where's my dog? The Search for Honest Leadership)
Everything I can say about what it means to lose, what it means to do without, the inadequate weight of the past, you already know.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
But we soon found out that the glory of war was at home among the ladies and not upon the field of blood and carnage of death, where our comrades were mutilated and torn by shot and shell.
Sam R. Watkins (Co. Aytch: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War)
Hoosiers aren't quitters. California people are quitters. No offense. It's just you've got restlessness in your blood." "I don't," she said, but he went on. "Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That's why no one wants them now. Mojavs.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
P.S. On second thought, perhaps sometimes these things are best left by the side of the road, as it were. Sometimes a person wants a part of you that's no good. Sometimes love is a wound that opens and closes, opens and closes, all our lives.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
In 1965 two British scientists, Henry Harris and John Watkins, took cell sex an important step further. They fused HeLa cells with mouse cells and created the first human-animal hybrids—cells that contained equal amounts of DNA from Henrietta and a mouse. By doing this, they helped make it possible to study what genes do, and how they work.
Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
She was brave from wine and unseasonable sunshine and the newfound closeness of home.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
They'd drink like men, like their fathers and uncles, like George fucking Washington...
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
The mind is a mine. So often we revisit its winding, unsound caverns when we ought to stay out.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
Leadership ultimately is about influence and leverage. You are, after all, only one person. To be successful, you need to mobilize the energy of many others in your organization.
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
Any complex system that has a repeating signal, pattern, beat or rhythm will always synchronize to the strongest and most powerful ‘pendulum’ or beat.
Alan Watkins (Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership)
Jules liked that I was a local. I made her feel authentic, which is especially important to Californians.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
After killing Aeysha, I left Chicago like Simone told me to. I ended up in Minnesota, where most niggas went when they wanted to come up.
Jessica N. Watkins (Secrets of a Side Bitch 2)
the reason we are so focused on time management as opposed to energy management is because it’s easier.
Alan Watkins (Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership)
I draw inspiration and energy from trying to make my little part of the world a better, healthier, more beautiful, and more sustainable place.
Julia Watkins (Simply Living Well: A Guide to Creating a Natural, Low-Waste Home)
Everyone there pretended to be so bohemian and radical but really they were all worried about offending everyone else and she was fucking sick of it.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
Read Talking With Young Children About Adoption by Susan Fisher, M.D., and Mary Watkins, Ph.D. (Yale University Press, 1995).
Sherrie Eldridge (Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew)
Wealth is not distributed by society: it is produced and traded by the people who create it. To distribute it, society would first have to seize it from the people who created it. This
Don Watkins (Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality)
One way to say all this is, Our mother was an addict and she overdosed. Another way is, Our mother was suicidal and she killed herself. Another way is, Our mother was poor and ignored and dismissed for years by doctors who put her on legal and extremely profitable heroin, which eventually killed her. Another way is, Our mother needed help and no one, including us, gave it to her.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation)
I love you," he said, and though she knew it was true she kept her eyes closed and said, "Don't say that." She did not want to allow that love could be so fearful and meager and misshapen. He left, and she did not try to stop him. She was through trying to stop him. She had been trying to stop him since the day they met.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn)
Joining a new company is akin to an organ transplant—and you’re the new organ. If you’re not thoughtful in adapting to the new situation, you could end up being attacked by the organizational immune system and rejected.
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
The streets provide an education in everything that many of these schools don’t, such as survival skills, kinship, moneymaking opportunities, and love. A love that is absent from the cold hallways of schools such as the ones Butta, I, and millions of other African Americans attend or attended. Butta’s school has been shut down, along
D. Watkins (The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America)
[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
... I do think there’s no better way to enrich your life than learning about the way things used to be and weaving into your daily routine at least a few time-honored practices and traditions whose simplicity and charm nourish the mind, body, and spirit.
Julia Watkins (Simply Living Well: A Guide to Creating a Natural, Low-Waste Home)
When you kissed me…I felt special. I never really felt like I deserved it. That isn’t your fault. That was me. When I looked down the aisle on our wedding day and you weren’t there, my first thought, as awful as this sounds, wasn’t, “Where is he?” it was, “Oh, it figures.
Virginia Nelson
Ancient people, we don’t just need to find out what things they made, how they lived. We need to see through their eyes, sense what they sensed… aware that their senses would have been much sharper than ours… accepting that they might well have been aware of things we no longer perceive.
Phil Rickman (Friends of the Dusk (Merrily Watkins, #13))
To live in God’s city here and now is to enjoy God’s limitless peace, love, and creativity; it is also to live a subversive, revolutionary life in this world as we repeatedly scratch the surface of the earthly city to reveal God’s goodness, truth, and beauty under its makeshift palimpsest.
Christopher Watkin (Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture)
The fabric of human life is woven with relationships. Once we thematize the importance of dialogue, the multiplicity of ongoing and created situations in which dialogical skills can be nurtured abound. As we have seen, this requires us to slow down and turn toward each other, having a clear sense of the relationship between our current footing in dialogue with one another and the future we are trying to create. The nurture of dialogical capacities is essential to human liberation.
Mary Watkins (Toward Psychologies of Liberation)
She’d long ago given up trying to visualize God. There was no He or She. This was a Presence higher than gender, race or religion, transcending identity. All she would ever hope to do was follow the lamplit path into a place within and yet beyond her own heart and stay there and wait, patient and passive and without forced piety.
Phil Rickman (The Cure of Souls (Merrily Watkins, #4))
When an inner-city child is stuck in a school that doesn’t educate him, that is a tragedy. But the problem isn’t that other children get a better education—it’s that the government has created an educational system that often doesn’t educate, and that makes it virtually impossible for anyone but the affluent to seek out alternatives. Of
Don Watkins (Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality)
She married Mr. Gundover's Dick.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Iola Leroy: Shadows Uplifted)
What is culture? It’s a set of consistent patterns people follow for communicating, thinking, and acting, all grounded in their shared assumptions and values.
Michael D. Watkins (Leadership Transitions: The Watkins Collection (4 Items))
I looked at Tarbox and saw he was a dangerous and ugly man. It was as if he had been born in someone's nightmare, then kicked his way out of their head.
Paul Watkins (The Promise of Light)
Before the dick, I had my shit together. I had goals, dreams, and aspirations. But after the dick, I was lost, turned out all over again, and needed Iyanla to fix my life.
Jessica N. Watkins (Secrets of a Side Bitch 3)
I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience – and laughter.
Susan M. Watkins
Once people perceive that change is going to happen, the game often shifts from outright opposition to a competition to influence what sort of change will occur.
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
There was always some savior out in the wilderness, some senator, some patent, some institute, some cell.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
The problem of course is that the link between IQ and performance is ‘distinctly underwhelming’ (Gladwell, 2010).
Alan Watkins (Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership)
The dog wants so bad it doesn’t know what it wants,
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn: Stories)
Had Ringo or Capone died during that exchange, it would have taken a piece of my heart, when I had a piece left only big enough to keep it beating. “C’mon,
Jessica N. Watkins (Secrets of a Side Bitch 2)
I was learning in rehab that I could no longer allow things to get to me so bad that I tried to fix it with temporary happiness. “Hey,
Jessica N. Watkins (Good Girls Ain't No Fun: (The Love, Sex, Lies Finale))
Karma is a bitch, and it will humble you when it comes back around.
Jessica N. Watkins (Bang)
He’d always had a crush on me. I never liked him because he wasn’t a challenge.
Jessica N. Watkins (Secrets of a Side Bitch - The Simone Campbell Story)
from an energy perspective we peak at 25 years old and, if left unchecked, our energy levels decline at roughly 3 per cent every year
Alan Watkins (Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership)
Poverty, injustice, and reading comprehension issues go hand in hand,
D. Watkins (The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America)
People don’t buy things because they think they want them; they buy them because they feel they need them!
Alan Watkins (Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership)
The most important decisions you make in your first 90 days will probably be about people.
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
Wicked problems are social problems. Global warming requires individuals to change what they are ‘doing’ in enough numbers to reverse the damage. But they won’t do that unless their ‘being’ can be changed and they can be connected with enough like-minded individuals through ‘relating’ to push through the change that alters the ‘doing’ and the actual interacting.
Alan Watkins (Wicked & Wise: How to solve the world's toughest problems (Wicked and Wise series Book 1))
And I was not going to tell him about the pregnancy. As far as I was concerned, even though I didn’t know what I was going to do, Damion was never going to know about this baby. “Hey,
Jessica N. Watkins (Love Me Some Him)
Matthew Watkins At the first Thanksgiving, one of the bloodiest battles ensued when it was discovered that the deliveryman forgot to bring extra duck sauce. Finn Is God is, on this enchanted evening, in love with a wonderful guy. Julie Seagle Going to write a book called “Binge, Screw, Loathe.” It will be about a hateful woman who travels across the US visiting all-you-can-eat brothels.
Jessica Park (Flat-Out Love (Flat-Out Love, #1))
My grandfather was a railroad brakeman, sixty years with the D&H. I'd sit on his lap when I was little, I remember, at the upstairs apartment on Watkins Avenue in Oneonta overlooking the tracks, and we'd look out at the yard together and watch the trains hooking up, and he'd pull his gold watch out of his vest pocket and squint at the dial, a gold pocket watch, and the bulging surface of the watch case was all scritch-scratched, etched with tiny soft lines, hundreds of tiny scratches, interlaced. And then he'd check the yard, my Grandpa, to see if the trains were running on time. In those days there was a rhythm to everything, there was an order to things, but now we're riding a runaway train that's carrying us all away to that final night where nothing is remembered and nothing matters.
Donald O'Donovan (Night Train)
Sal was young and undeniably stupid, though his stupidity was of the rare variety that provoked envy in the more intelligent, rather than contempt, for it would surely leave the boy content for all his days.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Gold Fame Citrus)
Aligning an organization is like preparing for a long sailing trip. First, you need to be clear on whether your destination (the mission and goals) and your route (the strategy) are the right ones. Then you can figure out which boat you need (the structure), how to outfit it (the processes), and which mix of crew members is best (the skill bases). Throughout the journey, you keep an eye out for reefs that are not on the charts.
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
It's not the suffering that wears you down and defeats you, it's the meaningless suffering. There's no limit to what human beings will put up with if they think it all has a purpose; there's no limit to what they'll sacrifice
William John Watkins
Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our life against that which we thought it would be by now.
Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn: Stories)
I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant—regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy—and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environment.” —JOHN F. WATKINS,    Principles of Behaviorism (1913)
William Landay (Defending Jacob)
She had a right to be hurt, confused, and seeking closure. What she did not have the right to do was act like I wasn’t supposed to be with the man that fathered my child and who I had been in love with for damn near ten whole years. Just as
Jessica N. Watkins (Good Girls Ain't No Fun: (The Love, Sex, Lies Finale))
Did you know, young lady,” said Watkin to her, “that the Book of Revelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the Divine, as you know. To me it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off, doesn’t it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you’re killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair. I find that very suggestive.
Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently #1))
The true source of economic security is self-reliance and economic freedom—Social Security is immoral because it subverts both. It sabotages the virtues that enable us to survive, prosper, and enjoy our lives—and the social system that lets us exercise those virtues.
Don Watkins (Rooseveltcare: How Social Security is Sabotaging the Land of Self Reliance)
She saw for the first time the way we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we've murdered__ the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in vases, a wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door-- every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum.
Claire Vaye Watkins
While at Colonel Niel's marquee I saw a detail of soldiers bring out a man by the name of Rowland, whom they were going to shoot to death with musketry, by order of a court-martial, for desertion. He was being hauled to the place of execution in a wagon, sitting on an old gun box, which was to be his coffin. When they got to the grave, which had been dug the day before, the water had risen in it, and a soldier was baling it out. Rowland spoke up and said, 'Please hand me a drink of that water, as I want to drink out of my own grave so the boys will talk about it when I am dead, and remember Rowland.
Sam R. Watkins (Co. Aytch: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War)
And her looks? Is she pretty?” asked Strange. The question seemed to embarrass Henry. “Miss Watkins is not generally considered one of the first in beauty, no. But then upon further acquaintance, you know – that is worth a great deal. People of both sexes, whose looks are very indifferent at the beginning, may appear almost handsome on further acquaintance. A well-informed mind, nice manners and a gentle nature – all of these are much more likely to contribute to a husband’s happiness than mere transient beauty.” Strange and Arabella were a little surprized at this speech. There was a pause and then Strange asked, “Money?
Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell)
Delegating, thinking strategically, communicating—you may think this all sounds like Management 101. And you’re right. The most basic elements of management are often what trip up managers early in their careers. And because they are the basics, the bosses of rookie managers often take them for granted. They shouldn’t—an extraordinary number of people fail to develop these skills. I’ve maintained an illusion throughout this article—that only rookie managers suffer because they haven’t mastered these core skills. But the truth is, managers at all levels make these mistakes. An organization that supports its new managers by helping them to develop these skills will have surprising advantages over the competition.
Linda A. Hill (HBR's 10 Must Reads for New Managers (with bonus article “How Managers Become Leaders” by Michael D. Watkins) (HBR's 10 Must Reads))
Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our life against that which we thought it would be by now. I'll tell you what I don't tell her, that there is something shameful in this, the buoying of our sinking spirits with old stories.
Claire Vay Watkins
Even though I was born in America, and my ancestors built its infrastructure for free, I’m not a part of the “Our” when they sing, “Our flag was still there!” I feel like the “Our” doesn’t include blacks, most women, gays, trans, and poor people of all colors. And, sadly, our nation reminds us every day. Some may reject the anthem because Francis Scott Key sang for freedom while enslaving blacks. His hatred even bled into the lyrics of the elongated version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” you won’t hear at a sporting event. The third stanza reads: No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave That line was basically a shot at slaves who agreed to fight with the British during the War of 1812 in exchange for their freedom.
D. Watkins (The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America)
Daily life makes us all susceptible to accumulating stress, mostly due to the non-stop demands and pressures of juggling work, home and personal responsibilities. This stress revs up the nervous system, causing the brain to flood the body with hormones that trigger overreacting, irrational thinking, and even insomnia. After years of unavoidable exposure to the stress reaction with no defense, the nervous system can become severely deteriorated, leaving us defenseless against mental or physical illness and disease.iv As it happens, meditation has been proven as one of the greatest counter-stress solutions.v When practiced daily, meditation can help to restore balance and re-supply much-needed rest to your physiology. Common side effects of daily meditation are increased energy and feelings of contentedness and inner happiness.vi
Light Watkins (The Inner Gym: A 30-Day Workout For Strengthening Happiness)
The climate for relationships within an innovation group is shaped by the climate outside it. Having a negative instead of a positive culture can cost a company real money. During Seagate Technology’s troubled period in the mid-to-late 1990s, the company, a large manufacturer of disk drives for personal computers, had seven different design centers working on innovation, yet it had the lowest R&D productivity in the industry because the centers competed rather than cooperated. Attempts to bring them together merely led people to advocate for their own groups rather than find common ground. Not only did Seagate’s engineers and managers lack positive norms for group interaction, but they had the opposite in place: People who yelled in executive meetings received “Dog’s Head” awards for the worst conduct. Lack of product and process innovation was reflected in loss of market share, disgruntled customers, and declining sales. Seagate, with its dwindling PC sales and fading customer base, was threatening to become a commodity producer in a changing technology environment. Under a new CEO and COO, Steve Luczo and Bill Watkins, who operated as partners, Seagate developed new norms for how people should treat one another, starting with the executive group. Their raised consciousness led to a systemic process for forming and running “core teams” (cross-functional innovation groups), and Seagate employees were trained in common methodologies for team building, both in conventional training programs and through participation in difficult outdoor activities in New Zealand and other remote locations. To lead core teams, Seagate promoted people who were known for strong relationship skills above others with greater technical skills. Unlike the antagonistic committees convened during the years of decline, the core teams created dramatic process and product innovations that brought the company back to market leadership. The new Seagate was able to create innovations embedded in a wide range of new electronic devices, such as iPods and cell phones.
Harvard Business School Press (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Innovation (with featured article "The Discipline of Innovation," by Peter F. Drucker))
Onboarding checklists Business orientation checklist As early as possible, get access to publicly available information about financials, products, strategy, and brands. Identify additional sources of information, such as websites and analyst reports. If appropriate for your level, ask the business to assemble a briefing book. If possible, schedule familiarization tours of key facilities before the formal start date. Stakeholder connection checklist Ask your boss to identify and introduce you to the key people you should connect with early on. If possible, meet with some stakeholders before the formal start. Take control of your calendar, and schedule early meetings with key stakeholders. Be careful to focus on lateral relationships (peers, others) and not only vertical ones (boss, direct reports). Expectations alignment checklist Understand and engage in business planning and performance management. No matter how well you think you understand what you need to do, schedule a conversation with your boss about expectations in your first week. Have explicit conversations about working styles with bosses and direct reports as early as possible. Cultural adaptation checklist During recruiting, ask questions about the organization’s culture. Schedule conversations with your new boss and HR to discuss work culture, and check back with them regularly. Identify people inside the organization who could serve as culture interpreters. After thirty days, conduct an informal 360-degree check-in with your boss and peers to gauge how adaptation is proceeding.
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)