A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

“You get a good idea today, a better idea tomorrow and the best idea … never.”

~ Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of radar;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"... There’s always new stuff out there, and most of it’s not very good. Rather than looking for the next musing, it’s probably better to be thorough about what we know is true and make sure we do that well.”


~ Phil Rosenzweig, a professor at IMD, in Switzerland;

A WISE QUOTE BEFORE THE END OF THE WEEK

"... Failure is a necessary part of a flourishing innovative ecosystem. Not every idea is destined for greatness. A talented individual working on an idea with fatal flaws by definition isn't working on an idea with transformational potential. When great talent is stuck working on the wrong things, the ecosystem as a whole suffers. The failure of failure leads to stagnation..."

~ Scott Anthony, founder of 'Innosight', now living in Singapore;

[More information about the author, his consultancy work & his writings is available at this link. He also writes a weblog on innovation insights at Harvard Business.]

A WISE QUOTE FOR THE WEEK

"Want to change the world? Change caterpillars into butterflies? This takes more than run-of-the-mill relationships. You need to convince people to dream the same dream that you do... That's a big goal, but one that's possible for all of us..."

~ Guy Kawasaki, author of 'Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions';

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"We can learn nearly as much from an experiment that does not work as from one that does. Failure is not something to be avoided but rather something to be cultivated. That's a lesson from science that benefits not only laboratory research, but design, sport, engineering, art, entrepreneurship, and even daily life itself. All creative avenues yield the maximum when failures are embraced."

~ Kevin Kelly, editor-at-large of Wired, pointed to the value of experimentation with negative results;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"The future is always impacting the present, impacting as an increasing & compounding cascade of grave inflection points. If survival is in the agenda, one must urgently take holistic thinking to the extremes, namely 'the truly thinkable' holistic thinking with grace, determination & thoroughly."

~ futurist Andreas Agostini (Andy);

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

“Any complex activity, if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament...

…Genius consists in a harmonious combination of elements, in which one or the other ability may predominate, but none may be in conflict with the rest.”

~ Carl Von Clausewitz, “On War”;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"In the face of this unprecedented challenge, the single most important quality that every CEO, banker, portfolio manager or politician should possess & display is agility."

- Tom Glocer, CEO, Thomson Reuters;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"Management has to do with answers. Leadership is a function of questions. And the first question for a leader always is 'Who do we intend to be?' NOT 'What are we going to do?' but 'Who do we intend to be?'"

- Max De Pree, Herman Miller;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"... from my experience, the best strategists retain a childlike wonder and a natural intellectual curiosity that is backed by analytical rigour - an incredibly hard combination of skills to possess in one person... "

~ consultant Jeffrey Swystun; also a reviewer on amazon.com;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"... human futures are unpredictable and it is futile to think that past trends will forecast coming patterns. The trajectory of technology might offer some opportunity for predicting the future... But even the 'pure' history of science features unanticipated findings, and must also contend with nature's stubborn tendency to frustrate our expectations...

Moreover any forecast about the future must consider the incendiary instability generated by interaction between technological change and the wierd ways of human conduct, both individual and social..."

~ Stephen Jay Gould;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries."

~ Prof. A.C. Grayling, in a review of ‘A History of Reading' by Alberto Manguel that was published in Financial Times;

QUITE A FASCINATING WAY TO PICTURE HUMAN THINKING...

"Human thinking is not very deep. In fact it’s only about 4 mm deep. That’s the thickness of the cerebral cortex or the brain’s gray matter. It contains a lot of neurons though - about 11 billion I read somewhere. About twice as many as that of a chimp.

It appears that it’s the size, density and connectivity of the brain’s neural network that makes it able to do what it does. Help us think.

I picture thinking as a cognitive process running on a neuroplatform, which in turn operates on 110 mV electrical pulses at the Ranvier nodes along axons and the flow of neurotransmitters across synaptic gaps. Still somewhat of a mystery how that turns into actual thoughts, ideas and perceptions in the human mind..."

Source: Brainovation Blog, by Anders Hemre, founder & CEO of InterKnowledge Technologies;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a person of the past or a pioneer of the future."

~ Deepak Chopra;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"... the companies most likely to be successful in making change work to their advantage are the ones that no longer view change as a discrete event to be managed, but as a constant opportunity to evolve the business... In these organizations, change readiness is the new change management..."

~ Chris Musselwhite & Tammie Plouffe, bloggers at Harvard Business Review;

[extracted from their blogpost at HBR; in the post, they shared four ways how organisations could be change-ready;]

I like their definition of 'Change readiness': "the ability to continuously initiate & respond to change in ways that create advantage, minimize risk, & sustain performance".

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"Leaders who rise to the top are ones who constantly sharpen their strategic thinking by questioning their own views, by listening to different viewpoints, surrounding themselves by people with different expertise areas and doing anything else they can to gain different perspectives..."

~ Shaun Rein, founder & managing director of the China Market Research Group, a strategic market intelligence firm;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"Both success & failure are simply outcomes in the normal life cycle of business - a life cycle in which overall process matters far more than any single event or outcome. Great businesses are those that develop the resiliency to bounce through these cycles to succeed over the long term."

~ entrepreneur & business owner Barry Moltz, also author of 'Bounce! Failure, Resiliency & Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success';

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you know and more will come back to you. The problem with hoarding is that you end up living off your reserves. Eventually you’ll become stale. If you give away everything you have, you’re left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish. Somehow, the more you give away, the more comes back to you. Ideas are open knowledge. Don’t claim ownership. They’re not your ideas anyway, they’re someone else’s. They are out there floating in the ether. You just have to put yourself in a frame of mind to pick them up. The hard part is having the balls to act on them"

- Paul Arden, 'It's not How Good You Are; It's How Good You Want To Be';

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"No one will thank you for taking care of the present if you have neglected the future."

~ futurist, author, & film-maker Joel Arthur Barker;

A WISE QUOTE FOR MONDAY MORNING

"All the business of war, & indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called "guessing what was at the other side of the hill"."

~ The First Duke of Wellington (Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley), (1769–1852); famous for the Battle of Waterloo, where he defeated Napoleon;