🖌️Henry Mintzberg - Collected Quotes

"Five coordinating mechanisms seem to explain the fundamental ways in which organizations coordinate their work: mutual adjustment, direct supervision, standardization of work processes, standardization of work outputs, and standardization of worker skills." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Structuring of Organizations", 1979)

"We find that the manager, particularly at senior levels, is overburdened with work. With the increasing complexity of modern organizations and their problems, he is destined to become more so. He is driven to brevity, fragmentation, and superficiality in his tasks, yet he cannot easily delegate them because of the nature of his information. And he can do little to increase his available time or significantly enhance his power to manage. Furthermore, he is driven to focus on that which is current and tangible in his work, even though the complex problems facing many organizations call for reflection and a far-sighted perspective." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Structuring of Organizations", 1979)

"[…] the most successful strategies are visions, not plans. Strategic planning isn’t strategic thinking. One is analysis, and the other is synthesis." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning", Harvard Business Review, 1994) [source] 

"Sometimes strategies must be left as broad visions, not precisely articulated, to adapt to a changing environment." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning", Harvard Business Review, 1994) [source] 

"Strategy making needs to function beyond the boxes to encourage the informal learning that produces new perspectives and new combinations. […] Once managers understand this, they can avoid other costly misadventures caused by applying formal techniques, without judgement and intuition, to problem solving." (Henry Mintzberg, 1994)

"Strategy-making is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle, and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes." (Henry Mintzberg, "Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Mangement", 2005)

"Theory is a dirty word in some managerial quarters. That is rather curious, because all of us, managers especially, can no more get along without theories than libraries can get along without catalogs - and for the same reason: theories help us make sense of incoming information." (Henry Mintzberg," Managers Not MBAs", 2005) 

"The real challenge in crafting strategy lies in detecting subtle discontinuities that may undermine a business in the future. And for that there is no technique, no program, just a sharp mind in touch with the situation." (Henry Mintzberg, "Tracking Strategies: Toward a General Theory", 2007)

"Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers." (Henry Mintzberg)

🖌️Ernest Dale - Collected Quotes

"Every company has beloved projects on which if prices had held up, if the contractors had finished on time (or finished at all), if the plans hadn't been altered, if the thing had actually worked, the planned return would have been earned. But since some or all of these calamities [things that don't go as expected] usually happen, any manager who neglects to allow for them is not planning - merely thinking wishfully. Desire for the project has, as usual, overtaken desire for profit." (Ernest Dale, "Planning and developing the company organization structure", 1952)

"Organization planning is the process of defining and grouping the activities of the enterprise so that they may be most logically assigned and effectively executed. It is concerned with the establishment of relationships among the units so as to further the objectives of the enterprise." (Ernest Dale, "Planning and developing the company organization structure", 1952)

"Management policies and the quality of leadership have a lot to do with individual performance." (Ernest Dale, "The Great Organizers", 1960)

"An organization that is based on pure rationality ignores many facets of human nature." (Ernest Dale, "Management: Theory and practice", 1965)

"Centralized controls are designed to ensure that the chief executive can find out how well the delegated authority and responsibility are being exercised." (Ernest Dale, "Management: Theory and practice", 1965)

"One difficulty in developing a good [accounting] control system is that quantitative results will differ according to the accounting principles used, and accounting principles may change." (Ernest Dale, "Readings in Management", 1970)

🖌️John Doerr - Collected Quotes

"An OBJECTIVE […] is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking - and fuzzy execution." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

"An effective goal management system - an OKR system - links goals to a team’s broader mission. It respects targets and deadlines while adapting to circumstances. It promotes feedback and celebrates wins, large and small. Most important, it expands our limits. It moves us to strive for what might seem beyond our reach." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

"Goals may cause systematic problems in organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

"Ideas are easy. Execution is everything." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

"Key results are the levers you pull, the marks you hit to achieve the goal. If an objective is well framed, three to five KRs will usually be adequate to reach it. Too many can dilute focus and obscure progress. Besides, each key result should be a challenge in its own right. If you’re certain you’re going to nail it, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. [...] Key results should be succinct, specific, and measurable. A mix of outputs and inputs is helpful. Finally, completion of all key results must result in attainment of the objective. If not, it’s not an OKR." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

"KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. […] You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

"[OKRs (Objectives and Key Results): are a] management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

"OKRs have such enormous potential because they are so adaptable. There is no dogma, no one right way to use them. Different organizations have fluctuating needs at various phases of their life cycle. For some, the simple act of making goals open and transparent is a big leap forward. For others, a quarterly planning cadence will change the game.." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

"To succeed, a stretch goal cannot seem like a long march to nowhere. Nor can it be imposed from on high without regard to realities on the ground. Stretch your team too fast and too far, and it may snap. In pursuing high-effort, high- risk goals, employee commitment is essential. Leaders must convey two things: the importance of the outcome, and the belief that it’s attainable." (John Doerr, "Measure what Matters", 2018)

🖌️A Stafford Beer - Collected Quotes

"[…] cybernetics studies the flow of information round a system, and the way in which this information is used by the system as a means of controlling itself: it does this for animate and inanimate systems indifferently. For cybernetics is an interdisciplinary science, owing as much to biology as to physics, as much to the study of the brain as to the study of computers, and owing also a great deal to the formal languages of science for providing tools with which the behaviour of all these systems can be objectively described." (A Stafford Beer, 1966)

"If cybernetics is the science of control, management is the profession of control." (A Stafford Beer, "Decision and Control", 1966)

"According to the science of cybernetics, which deals with the topic of control in every kind of system (mechanical, electronic, biological, human, economic, and so on), there is a natural law that governs the capacity of a control system to work. It says that the control must be capable of generating as much 'variety' as the situation to be controlled." (A Stafford Beer, "Management Science", 1968)

"Policy-making, decision-taking, and control: These are the three functions of management that have intellectual content." (A Stafford Beer, "Management Science" , 1968)

"Management is not founded on observation and experiment, but on a drive towards a set of outcomes. These aims are not altogether explicit; at one extreme they may amount to no more than an intention to preserve the status quo, at the other extreme they may embody an obsessional demand for power, profit or prestige. But the scientist's quest for insight, for understanding, for wanting to know what makes the system tick, rarely figures in the manager's motivation. Secondly, and therefore, management is not, even in intention, separable from its own intentions and desires: its policies express them. Thirdly, management is not normally aware of the conventional nature of its intellectual processes and control procedures. It is accustomed to confuse its conventions for recording information with truths-about-the-business, its subjective institutional languages for discussing the business with an objective language of fact and its models of reality with reality itself." (A Stafford Beer, "Decision and Control", 1994)

"Industrial managers faced with a problem in production control invariably expect a solution to be devised that is simple and unidimensional. They seek the variable in the situation whose control will achieve control of the whole system: tons of throughput, for example. Business managers seek to do the same thing in controlling a company; they hope they have found the measure of the entire system when they say 'everything can be reduced to monetary terms'." (A Stafford Beer, "Decision and Control", 1994)

"The trouble is that no manager can really handle the full-scale isomorph of his enterprise unless he is the only employee. To delegate is to embark on a series of one-many transformations. The manager can at best settle for a homomorph consisting of all the ones." (A Stafford Beer, "Decision and Control", 1994)

🖌️Andrew S Grove - Collected Quotes

"A team will perform well only if peak performance is elicited from the individuals in it." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"As for cultural values, management has to develop and nurture the common set of values, objectives, and methods essential for the existence of trust. How do we do that? One way is by articulation, by spelling out these values, objectives, and methods. The other, even more important, way is by example. If our behavior at work will be regarded as in line with the values we profess, that fosters the development of a group culture." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Automation is certainly one way to improve the leverage of all types of work. Having machines to help them, human beings can create more output. But in both widget manufacturing and administrative work, something else can also increase the productivity of the black box. This is called work simplification. To get leverage this way, you first need to create a flow chart of the production process as it exists. Every single step must be shown on it; no step should be omitted in order to pretty things up on paper. Second, count the number of steps in the flow chart so that you know how many you started with. Third, set a rough target for reduction of the number of steps." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Because the art and science of forecasting is so complex, you might be tempted to give all forecasting responsibility to a single manager who can be made accountable for it. But this usually does not work very well. What works better is to ask both the manufacturing and the sales departments to prepare a forecast, so that people are responsible for performing against their own predictions." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"But in the end self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled. And everyone in your operation should be made to understand this." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"In effect, the lack of a decision is the same as a negative decision; no green light is a red light, and work can stop for a whole organization." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"In other words, the output of the planning process is the decisions made and the actions taken as a result of the process." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"[...] in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Indicators tend to direct your attention toward what they are monitoring. It is like riding a bicycle: you will probably steer it where you are looking. If, for example, you start measuring your inventory levels carefully, you are likely to take action to drive your inventory levels down, which is good up to a point. But your inventories could become so lean that you can’t react to changes in demand without creating shortages. So because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured. Thus, in the inventory example, you need to monitor both inventory levels and the incidence of shortages. A rise in the latter will obviously lead you to do things to keep inventories from becoming too low." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"[...] leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Leading indicators give you one way to look inside the black box by showing you in advance what the future might look like. And because they give you time to take corrective action, they make it possible for you to avoid problems." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Managerial productivity - that is, the output of a manager per unit of time worked - can be increased in three ways: 1.  Increasing the rate with which a manager performs his activities, speeding up his work. 2.  Increasing the leverage associated with the various managerial activities. 3.  Shifting the mix of a manager’s activities from those with lower to those with higher leverage." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Much confusion exists between what is strategy and what is tactics. Although the distinction is rarely of practical significance, here’s one that might be useful. As you formulate in words what you plan to do, the most abstract and general summary of those actions meaningful to you is your strategy. What you’ll do to implement the strategy is your tactics. Frequently, a strategy at one managerial level is the tactical concern of the next higher level." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"So because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured. […] In sum, joint monitoring is likely to keep things in the optimum middle ground." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Someone adhering to the values of a corporate culture - an intelligent corporate citizen- will behave in consistent fashion under similar conditions, which means that managers don’t have to suffer the inefficiencies engendered by formal rules, procedures, and regulations. […] management has to develop and nurture the common set of values, objectives, and methods essential to the existence of trust. How do we do that? One way is by articulation, by spelling [them] out. […] The other even more important way is by example." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The first rule is that a measurement - any measurement - is better than none. But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. […] If you do not systematically collect and maintain an archive of indicators, you will have to do an awful lot of quick research to get the information you need, and by the time you have it, the problem is likely to have gotten worse."(Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The number of possible indicators you can choose is virtually limitless, but for any set of them to be useful, you have to focus each indicator on a specific operational goal. […] Put another way, which five pieces of information would you want to look at each day, immediately upon arriving at your office?" (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"[...] the output of a manager is a result achieved by a group either under her supervision or under her influence. While the manager’s own work is clearly very important, that in itself does not create output. Her organization does." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The role of the manager here is also clear: it is that of the coach. First, an ideal coach takes no personal credit for the success of his team, and because of that his players trust him. Second, he is tough on his team. By being critical, he tries to get the best performance his team members can provide. Third, a good coach was likely a good player himself at one time. And having played the game well, he also understands it well."  (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance from his subordinates. So if two things limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"There is no question that having standards and believing in them and staffing an administrative unit objectively using forecasted workloads will help you to maintain and enhance productivity." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Your general planning process should consist of analogous thinking. Step 1 is to establish projected need or demand: What will the environment demand from you, your business, or your organization? Step 2 is to establish your present status: What are you producing now? What will you be producing as your projects in the pipeline are completed? Put another way, where will your business be if you do nothing different from what you are now doing? Step 3 is to compare and reconcile steps 1 and 2. Namely, what more (or less) do you need to do to produce what your environment will demand?" (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"Your information sources should complement one another, and also be redundant because that gives you a way to verify what you’ve learned." (Andrew S Grove, "High Output Management", 1983)

"You can’t judge the significance of strategic inflection points by the quality of the first version. You need to draw on your experience [...] you must discipline yourself to think things through and separate the quality of the early versions from the longer-term potential and significance of a new product or technology." (Andrew S Grove, 1996)

"When the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, [existing management] must adopt an outsider’s intellectual objectivity [...] unfettered by an emotional attachment to the past." (Andrew S Grove, 1996)

"[...] a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Admitting that you need to learn something new is always difficult. It is even harder if you are a senior manager who is accustomed to the automatic deference which people accord you owing to your position. But if you don’t fight it, that very deference may become a wall that isolates you from learning new things. It all takes self-discipline." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Altogether too often, people substitute opinions for facts and emotions for analysis." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more Successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Of course, you can’t spend all of your time listening to random inputs. But you should be open to them. As you keep doing it, you will develop a feel for whose views are apt to contain gems of information and a sense of who will take advantage of your openness to clutter you with noise. Over time, then, you can adjust your receptivity accordingly." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Senior management needed to step in and make some very tough moves. [...] we also realized then that there must be a better way to formulate strategy. What we needed was a balanced interaction between the middle managers, with their deep knowledge but narrow focus, and senior management, whose larger perspective could set a context." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"The ability to recognize that the winds have shifted and to take appropriate action before you wreck your boat in crucial to the future of an enterprise." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"You need to plan the way a fire department plans: It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event." (Andrew S Grove, "Only the Paranoid Survive", 1998)

"Selectivity - the determination to choose what we will attempt to get done and what we won't - is the only way out of the panic that excessive demands on our time can create." (Andrew S. Grove)

​​​​​​🖌️Jack Welch - Collected Quotes

"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion." (Jack Welch, Harvard Business Review, 1989)

"Business success is less a function of grandiose predictions than it is a result of being able to respond rapidly to real changes as they occur." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"I've learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor." (Jack Welch, "Jack: Straight from the Gut", 2001)

"Achieving work-life balance is a process. Getting it right is iterative. You get better at it with experience and observation, and eventually, after some time passes, you notice it’s not getting harder anymore. It’s just what you do." (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"At the end of the day, effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible. They give people a clear sense of the direction to profitability and the inspiration to feel they are part of something big and important." (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"Forget the arduous, intellectualized number crunching and data grinding that gurus say you have to go through to get strategy right. Forget the scenario planning, yearlong studies, and hundred-plus-page reports. They’re time-consuming and expensive, and you just don’t need them. In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell." (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?" (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"It sounds awful, but a crisis rarely ends without blood on the floor. That’s not easy or pleasant. But sadly, it is often necessary so the company can move forward again." (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"No vision is worth the paper it's printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards." (Jack Welch, "Winning", 2005)

"An organization’​​​​​​s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage."​​​​ (​​​​​​Jack Welch)

🖌️Warren G Bennis - Collected Quotes

"If we view organizations as adaptive, problem-solving structures, then inferences about effectiveness have to be made, not from static measures of output, but on the basis of the processes through which the organization approaches problems. In other words, no single measurement of organizational efficiency or satisfaction - no single time-slice of organizational performance can provide valid indicators of organizational health." (Warren G Bennis, "General Systems Yearbook", 1962)

"Leaders do not avoid, repress, or deny conflict, but rather see it as an opportunity" (Warren G Bennis, "Why Leaders Can't Lead: The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues", 1976)

"We have more information now than we can use, and less knowledge and understanding than we need. Indeed, we seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven't devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows." (Warren G Bennis, "Why leaders can't lead: the unconscious conspiracy continues", 1976)

"Leaders value learning and mastery, and so do people who work for leaders. Leaders make it clear that there is no failure, only mistakes that give us feedback and tell us what to do next." (Warren G Bennis, Training and Development Journal, 1984)

"Excellence is a better teacher than is mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary." (Warren G Bennis, "Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration", 1997)

"Great things are accomplished by talented people who believe they will accomplish them." (Warren G Bennis, "Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration", 1997)

"The ability to plan for what has not yet happened, for a future that has only been imagined, is one of the hallmarks of leadership." (Warren G Bennis, "Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration", 1997)

"Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do." (Warren Bennis, "Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration", 1997)

"Failing organizations are usually overmanaged and under-led." (Warren G Bennis, 1988)

"Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality." (Warren G Bennis, 1988)

"There is a profound difference between information and meaning." (Warren G Bennis, 1988)

"Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them." (Warren G Bennis, "On Becoming a Leader", 1989)

"Manage the dream: Create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then translate that vision into a reality." (Warren G Bennis, "On Becoming a Leader", 1989) 

"Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person." (Warren G Bennis, "On Becoming a Leader", 1989)

"With a vision, the executive provides the all-important bridge from the present to the future of the organization." (Warren G Bennis, "Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics, and Ecology", 1994)

"Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organization. When that happens, people feel centered and that gives their work meaning." (Warren G Bennis, "Managing People Is Like Herding Cat", 1999) 

"The basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mindset, the framework of the other person." (Warren Bennis, "Managing People Is Like Herding Cat", 1999) 

🖌️Tim Brown - Collected Quotes

"A culture that believes that it is better to ask forgiveness afterward rather than permission before, that rewards people for success but gives them permission to fail, has removed one of the main obstacles to the formation of new ideas." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009) 

"Although it can at times seem forbiddingly abstract, design thinking is embodied thinking - embodied in teams and projects, to be sure, but embodied in the physical spaces of innovation as well." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Although it might seem as though frittering away valuable time on sketches and models and simulations will slow work down, prototyping generates results faster." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Anything tangible that lets us explore an idea, evaluate it, and push it forward is a prototype." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Design has the power to enrich our lives by engaging our emotions through image, form, texture, color, sound, and smell. The intrinsically human-centered nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Design thinking taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It is not only human-centered; it is deeply human in and of itself. Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Just as it can accelerate the pace of a project, prototyping allows the exploration of many ideas in parallel. Early prototypes should be fast, rough, and cheap. The greater the investment in an idea, the more committed one becomes to it. Overinvestment in a refined prototype has two undesirable consequences: First, a mediocre idea may go too far toward realization - or even, in the worst case, all the way. Second, the prototyping process itself creates the opportunity to discover new and better ideas at minimal cost." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Mostly we rely on stories to put our ideas into context and give them meaning. It should be no surprise, then, that the human capacity for storytelling plays an important role in the intrinsically human-centered approach to problem solving, design thinking." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Prototypes should command only as much time, effort, and investment as is necessary to generate useful feedback and drive an idea forward. The greater the complexity and expense, the more 'finished' it is likely to seem and the less likely its creators will be to profit from constructive feedback - or even to listen to it. The goal of prototyping is not to create a working model. It is to give form to an idea to learn about its strengths and weaknesses and to identify new directions for the next generation of more detailed, more refined prototypes. A prototype’s scope should be limited. The purpose of early prototypes might be to understand whether an idea has functional value." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Prototyping at work is giving form to an idea, allowing us to learn from it, evaluate it against others, and improve upon it." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Prototyping is always inspirational - not in the sense of a perfected artwork but just the opposite: because it inspires new ideas. Prototyping should start early in the life of a project, and we expect them to be numerous, quickly executed, and pretty ugly." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Since openness to experimentation is the lifeblood of any creative organization, prototyping - the willingness to go ahead and try something by building it - is the best evidence of experimentation." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"The project is the vehicle that carries an idea from concept to reality." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"Traditionally, one of the problems with architectural design is that full-scale prototyping is virtually impossible because it is just too expensive." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)

"To be sure, prototyping new organizational structures is difficult. By their nature, they are suspended in webs of interconnectedness. No unit can be tinkered with without affecting other parts of the organization. Prototyping with peoples’ lives is also a delicate proposition because there is, rightly, less tolerance for error. But despite this complexity, some institutions have taken a designer’s approach to organizational change." (Tim Brown, "Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation", 2009)