...[I]ron discipline does not preclude but presupposes criticism and contest of opinion within the Party. Least of all does it mean that discipline must be 'blind'. On the contrary, iron discipline does not preclude but presupposes conscious and voluntary submission, for only conscious discipline can be truly iron discipline.
In life, you get what you believe you deserve.
No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can't make a difference.
At the heart of all sales and marketing is the ability to create demand even in the absence of logic.
The real challenge is for each of us to determine where we feel we can make the most impact.
Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.
Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure
To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.
No one who ever led a nation got there by following the path of another.
You'll never know how close you are to victory if you give up.
Most startup failures result from entrepreneurs who are better at making excuses than products.
Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.
A free and open Internet is a despot's worst enemy.
The best big idea is only going to be as good as its implementation.
Smart entrepreneurs learn that they must fail often and fast.
Our world's future is far more malleable and controllable than most people realize.
The customer is always right...even when they're wrong.
Those that recognize the inevitability of change stand to benefit the most from it.
The joy of disruption comes from accepting that we all live in a temporal state.
Billions of dollars worth of research knowledge lie dormant at American universities waiting for the right disruptor to come along and create a business.
Crowdsourcing is the ultimate disruptor of distribution because in a most Zen-like fashion, the content is controlled by everyone and no one at the same time.
The power of crowd sourcing always remains with the crowd, not the technological implementation.
Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.
Speed to fail should be every entrepreneur's motto. When you finally find the one idea that can't be killed, go with it.
Your energy is a valuable resource, distribute it wisely.
An average idea enthusiastically embraced will go farther than a genius idea no one gets.
Insight and drive are all the skills you need. Everything else can be hired.
The most important tool you have on a resume is language.
Be the best at what you do or the only one doing it.
Starting each day with a positive mindset is the most important step of your journey to discovering opportunity.
The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.
If life, you get what you believe you deserve.
A career is just a longer trip with a whole lot more baggage.
You will have more regrets for the things you didn't try than the ones you tried and didn't succeed at.
Building a career or a company is about living a few years of your life like most people won't so that you can spend the rest of your life living at a level most people can't.
You can truly have it all, just not all at the same time.
If you don't know where you want to be in five years, how do you ever expect to get there?
Plan for ways to get more enjoyment into your life and you will get more joy out of it.
Accepting that the odds are against you is the same as accepting defeat before you begin.
Whether driven by ambition or circumstance, every career gets disrupted.
Data has no ego and makes an excellent co-pilot.
Corporate planning cycles are a classic example of generals fighting the last war over again instead of preparing for what might lie ahead.
A disruptor finds opportunity and profit from his misfortunes.
A dream with a deadline is a goal.
A negative mind will never find success. I have never heard a positive idea come from a person in a negative state.
Problems are just businesses waiting for the right entrepreneur to unlock the value.
The most successful people have the same twenty-four hours in a day that you do.
If you can imagine a solution, you can make it happen.
It is not incumbent on the world to conform to your vision of change. It is up to you to explain the future in terms that those living in the past and present can follow.
CEOs will gladly overpay for a company if the acquisition enables them to keep their jobs.
There are two types of people in this world: those whose look for opportunity and those who make it happen.
The business world is littered with the fossils of companies that failed to evolve. Disrupt or be disrupted. There is no middle ground.
You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.
All businesses -- no matter if they make dog food or software -- don't sell products, they sell solutions.
There is a difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up.
There are riches to be found simply by capturing the value released through others' disruptive breakthroughs.
The majority of people are not willing to risk what they have built for the opportunity to have something better.
Would you rather work forty hours a week at a job you hate or eighty hours a week doing work you love?
Disruption isn't about what happens to you, it's about how you respond to what happens to you.
All Disruption starts with introspection.
Disruption causes vast sums of money to flow from existing businesses and business models to new entrants.
Self-disruption is akin to undergoing major surgery, but you are the one holding the scalpel.
Data may disappoint, but it never lies.
Any vigorous competition will entail at least two elements: offense and defense. Offense is the effort you put into scoring against your opponents, and defense is the effort you apply to stop them from scoring against you. Those who suggest that "a little healthy competition can't hurt" are thinking only of the offense part....The offense component of internal competition is problematic, but the defense component is always injurious. When peer managers play defense against each other (try to stop each other from scoring), they are engaging in anticooperation.
If the essential task of middle managers is reinvention, when is that task to be carried out? The answer is, during time that is not used up directing day-to-day business. The fact that managers have time on their hands (i.e., their operations tasks take up less than eight hours per day) gives them time for reinvention. The extra time is not waste, but slack. Without it they could function in only their operational roles. Reinvention would be impossible because the people who could make it happen are just too busy to take the time.Even companies that didn't fire their change centers have hurt themselves by encouraging their middle managers to stay extremely busy. In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack.
There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative.