Posts filed under 'Quotes'
August 31st, 2010
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog. You can also buy the E-book version at http://www.leanpub.com/skmurphy2
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“I don’t watch metrics on a daily basis because I don’t make metrics-based decisions on a daily basis”
Patrick Mackenzie
From “Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator” an interview with Patrick Mackenzie
Q: Can you share the key metrics you watch on a daily basis? Why are they important to you?
A: I have published a variety of stats but I don’t watch metrics on a daily basis because I don’t make metrics-based decisions on a daily basis, and absent making decisions watching metrics is only as productive as playing WoW.
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“I used to think I had ambition…but now I’m not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They’re easily confused.”
Rachel Field
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“Late to bed, and late to rise, makes a man sick, poor, and stupid.”
Goodman Ace
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“No man is rich whose expenditure exceeds his means; and no one is poor whose income exceeds his outgoings.”
Thomas Chandler Haliburton
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“The point of forecasting is not to attempt illusory certainty, but to identify the full range of possible outcomes.”
Paul Saffo
From his blog entry for July 26, 2008: “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held” I offered additional commentary in “Paul Saffo: Forecasting is Strong Opinions, Weakly Held” I am a big fan of Paul Saffo and have blogged about him in these posts:
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“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”
Paul Valery
I used this post in a postscript to “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held” I thought that it neatly summarized the
“entrepreneur’s perpetual challenge: we have to let go of our nostalgia for our imagined (or anticipated) future and deal with the real options that we have created or are otherwise available to us.”
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“The only real training for leadership is leadership.”
Anthony Jay
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“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
Heraclitus
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“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
Ursula K. LeGuin
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“I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.”
Henry David Thoreau “On Civil Disobedience“
August 19th, 2010
My first real job was as a furniture mover when I was 16. When it came time to put together a resume as I was graduating from college “picked up and moved heavy objects without getting hurt” was the best description I could come up with. I came across a copy of that first resume over the weekend and tried to recapture my frame of mind when I wrote it. I couldn’t.
“Try as we will, we cannot honestly recall our youth, for we have lost its main ingredient: suspense.”
Mignon McLaughlin
“There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone; but, years after, we know it was much later.”
Mignon McLaughlin
August 16th, 2010
From Paul Saffo’s blog entry for July 26, 2008: “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held”
The point of forecasting is not to attempt illusory certainty, but to identify the full range of possible outcomes. Try as one might, when one looks into the future, there is no such thing as “complete” information, much less a “complete” forecast. As a consequence, I have found that the fastest way to an effective forecast is often through a sequence of lousy forecasts. Instead of withholding judgment until an exhaustive search for data is complete, I will force myself to make a tentative forecast based on the information available, and then systematically tear it apart, using the insights gained to guide my search for further indicators and information. Iterate the process a few times, and it is surprising how quickly one can get to a useful forecast.
Since the mid-1980s, my mantra for this process is “strong opinions, weakly held.” Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then –and this is the “weakly held” part– prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction. Eventually your intuition will kick in and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble, ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again. You will be surprised by how quickly the sequence of faulty forecasts will deliver you to a useful result.
This is a difficult perspective to maintain in the face of so much economic turbulence and continual technological revolutions. But until I can come up with a better one it’s what I am going to stick with.
Startups and small firms are able to avoid macro-economic trends by navigating to emerging opportunities. Large firms are less nimble and find it harder to escape average performance. It’s not clear to me that Silicon Valley as a whole can escape the effects of being situated in a California economy that is collapsing and a state government that is effectively bankrupt. But individual firms can move to segments of the economy that will grow (or at least remain stable).
At least that’s what I keep telling myself: “In the midst of this downturn, keep looking for where the new opportunities are emerging.”
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Postscript Wed-Aug-18: I came across this quote today
“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”
Paul Valery
and realized that this is the entrepreneur’s perpetual challenge: we have to let go of our nostalgia for our imagined (or anticipated) future and deal with the real options that we have created or are otherwise available to us.
July 31st, 2010
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog. You can also buy the E-book version at http://www.leanpub.com/skmurphy2
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“Americans claim a psychic strength: hard times create a collective response.”
Peter Goodman “The Great Rupture” quoted at length in Fourth of July 2010
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“Remember, the customer will usually forgive any mistake you admit, except a lie.”
Ken Robbins on twitter 5:35 PM May 13th
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The good news is that unemployment has fallen to “only” 9.5 percent. The bad news is that the jobless rate is down only because so many people have given up hope of finding work. Perversely, the jobless who aren’t actively looking for jobs are not counted as “unemployed.”
Perhaps there should be a new category titled “mired in existential despair.”
Let me put it in terms that Washington understands: The party that begins to treat the unemployment crisis with the hair-on-fire urgency that it deserves is the party that will do well in November.
Eugene Robinson in “Fiddling While Economy Burns“
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“Can the US re-energize the real mainsprings of American power: technological innovation and entrepreneurship?”
Niall Ferguson in “The Future of America’s Economy“
More context:
“Unlike Britain in 1945, which was crushed by debt and slow growth, doomed to imperial decline, I think there is a way out for the United States. I don’t think it’s over. But it all hinges on whether you can re-energize the real mainsprings of American power. And those two things are: innovation, technological innovation, and entrepreneurship. Those are the things that made the United States the greatest economy in the world, and the critical question is: Are we going to get it right? Can we revive those things in such a way that, in the end, we grow our way out of this hole the way the United States grew its way out of the 1970s and, of course, out of the 1930s?”
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“There is no such thing as a self-made man. You will reach your goals only with the help of others.”
George Shinn
With a hat tip to Jordy Mont-Reynaud
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“If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it is a fact.”
Yitzhak Rabin
Quoted by Clay Shirky in “It’s Not Information Overload, It’s Filter Failure” (Video: http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460/ )
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“Ability is a rare article. But there is something that is much scarcer, something finer far, something rarer than this quality of Ability. It is the ability to recognize Ability.”
Elbert Hubbard
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“Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. It must ensue. And it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.”
Viktor Frankl
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“It’s amazing how long it takes to complete something you’re not working on.”
R.D. Clyde
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“Community precedes commerce.”
John Hagel in “It Takes a Village to Make a Mall“
Highlighted in Kevin Kelly’s “Predicting the Present, The First Five Years of Wired”
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“Base your strategy on things that won’t change in the next five to ten years.”
Jeff Bezos
More context from “Jeff Bezos on Strategic Planning”
- What I have found—and this is an empirical observation; I see no reason why it should be the case, but it tends to be—is that when we plant a seed, it tends to take five to seven years before it has a meaningful impact on the economics of the company.
- It helps to base your strategy on things that won’t change. When I’m talking with people outside the company, there’s a question that comes up very commonly: “What’s going to change in the next five to ten years?” But I very rarely get asked “What’s not going to change in the next five to ten years?” At Amazon we’re always trying to figure that out, because you can really spin up flywheels around those things. All the energy you invest in them today will still be paying you dividends ten years from now.
- Whereas if you base your strategy first and foremost on more transitory things—who your competitors are, what kind of technologies are available, and so on—those things are going to change so rapidly that you’re going to have to change your strategy very rapidly, too.
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“If you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system”
Kevin Marks in “How Not To Be Viral“
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“That thud of the back against the wall is a fantastic motivator.”
Christopher L. Smith
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“Waste anything but time. Time is the one thing we do not have.”
From When Worlds Collide
Hat tip to Rafe Needleman’s post “The Most Valuable Resource” where he noted:
The business lesson of the camp Sci Fi classic, When Worlds Collide, was this sign at the spaceport where the plucky humans were building the ship that was supposed to rescue humanity before the Earth was destroyed: “Waste anything but time. Time is the one thing we do not have.”
The Internet Movie Database credits Edwin Balmer (writer on screenplay), Sydney Boehm (writer on screenplay), and
Philip Wylie (for novel).
July 14th, 2010
Thanks to a retweet by Daniel McKenzie I stumbled across Marty Neumeier’s twitter feed and discovered a stream of insight related to design thinking. I have selected my favorite ten:
In an era of perpetual innovation, you’re either revolutionizing or commoditizing.
This reminds me of the “walking up the down escalator” model from Geoffrey Moore’s “Dealing with Darwin” if you are not continually innovating your core then you are overwhelmed by context and carried down by commodization.
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Belief is a placeholder for knowledge.
I really like this one. You have to start from your beliefs, acknowledging them before you can construct hypotheses to lead you to knowledge.
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Like a flywheel, a culture of innovation builds momentum with small inputs, but releases great energy when needed.
The discipline of a steady accumulation of small improvements is as important as a breakthrough idea.
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The current management model is a veritable thrift store of hand-me-down concepts, designed for a previous need and a previous era.
Looking at business practices in 2010, I think they are going to have the following differences in operating requirements:
- Incessant / Real-Time
- Global / Globally Connected
- Transparent / Seamless Linkages With Customers & Suppliers
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The secret to collaboration is finding a rhythm that alternates between team creativity and individual creativity.
We use this rhythm between individual thinking, pairwise collaboration, and group discussion in our workshops to help attendees arrive at more creative solutions. I first heard this approach described by Doug Hall as an approach to brainstorming sessions that allowed introverts to more fully participate and to generate more candidate ideas because the first phase allows everyone to contribute simultaneously.
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A designer is anyone who plots change for the better.
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We can no longer decide the way forward. Today we have to design the way forward.
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Talented people love to collaborate when roles are defined, goals are clear, and the bar is high.
I think this is a succinct recipe for fostering collaboration: clear goals, clear roles, and a level of challenge requires teamwork to surmount.
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A rule is a scar from a previous bad experience.
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The biggest hurdle to innovation is a corporate longing for certainty.
I think founding teams that start with a focus on convincing investors instead of customers suffer from this same longing for certainty, thinking “if we can convince professional investors then our plan must be good.”
I have not ready any of his books but I plan to given the insights he has offered on twitter. For more from Marty Neumeier see:
June 30th, 2010
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire, wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog, or purchase the E-book version at http://www.leanpub.com/skmurphy2
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“Amateurs practice until they can get it right; pros practice until they can’t get it wrong.”
Mark Zimmerman in “Makes Perfect” (although may not be original with him)
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A startup walks into a bar and says “I’m going to revolutionize the way people walk into bars.”
Kevin Owocki
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“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.”
Louis L’Amour opening lines to “Lonely on the Mountain“
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“If people who make millions of dollars a year were as honest as people who do not, we all might be a whole lot better off.”
Stanley Bing in “New York. Honestly.“
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“We cannot recapture the past, but sometimes it can recapture us–if we are not careful.”
Thomas Sowell in “Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene (June-8-2010)”
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“All is pattern, all life, be we can’t always see the pattern when we are part of it.”
Belva Plain
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“Were all men equal tonight, some would get the start by rising an hour earlier tomorrow.”
Elizabeth Gaskell
One reason to get out of bed to get to a 7:30am Bootstrappers Breakfast.
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“The Revolution will not be televised. The Revolution will be no rerun, brothers. The Revolution — will be live.”
Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,
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“Best Practices, n.: Making the same mistakes everyone else does.”
Chris Barts in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283262
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“I got a feeling, and it won’t go away. oh, no.
Just one thing, then I’ll be okay.
I need a miracle every day.”
John Perry Barlow lyricist on “I Need a Miracle”
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“Life is full of miracles, but they are not always the ones that we pray for. ”
Eve Arden
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“The three requirements for influence are relevance, credibility, and insight.”
Dan Holden (@Dan_Holden)
I really like Dan’s triad of relevance, credibility, and insight; any two are probably not sufficient. Deft influence can unlock tremendous value.
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Empires build Death Stars, rebels build X-Wing fighters
Sean Murphy “Finding a Co-Founder: 3 Months is a Long Time“
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“The human race has now become almost a single entity, divided by time zones rather than the natural frontiers of geography.”
Arthur C. Clarke
see also Beat the Clock
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“Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.”
Leo Rosten
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“History unfolds in the space between difficult and impossible.”
John Hayward in “The Pillars of Apathy“
More context
Every time I write something optimistic about the future of the United States, I hear from some doomsayers who assure me things will never get any better. Pessimistic conservatives say we’re locked into a death spiral, at the mercy of a system running on autopilot and programmed to crash. I also hear from some liberals who maintain there is no morally acceptable alternative to unsustainable Big Government, so we’re honor-bound to hold our course… right into the giant iceberg of insolvency approaching off the port bow.
I maintain my optimism by rejecting the ideas serving as the pillars of apathy.
I refuse to believe government programs launched in the Forties, Sixties, and Seventies are indestructible features of our lives, immune to repeal or reform. I don’t believe a nation with a 234-year history of courage and industry is destined to suffocate in a shallow pool of nanny-state cement, poured only a few generations ago. It will be difficult for the American giant to rise again… but history unfolds in the space between difficult and impossible.
There is no such thing as eternal legislation. Even the Constitution can be amended. It’s only a question of how much willpower it will take for us to cast aside the intolerable acts of our political class. We are descended from men who showed great vigor in resisting intolerable acts.
June 23rd, 2010
Excerpts from section 7 “Seek Wisdom, Competence, and Confidence” of “Slow Down to Speed Up” by Ronald J. Stupak and David S. Greisler
The half-life of information is six months.
The half-life of wisdom is a lifetime.
The self is not infinitely elastic. It has potentials and it has limits. If the work we do lacks integrity for us, then we, the work, and the people we do it with will suffer.
Fundamentally, there must be a blend and a balance among your intellectual quotient, your emotional quotient, and your spiritual commitments, as you move from the notion of learning to the motion of acting. Thinking without action is futile, action without thinking is fatal, and doing either without a deep commitment to community, interpersonal collaboration, professional competence, and personal confidence is to fail.
Perpetual optimism, positive attitudes, and purposeful performance lead to positive actions.
April 30th, 2010
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire, wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog, or purchase the E-book version at http://www.leanpub.com/skmurphy2
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“There was a long silence on the other end, a silence peculiar to conference calls when an entire group stops to think.”
Clay Shirky in “The Collapse of Complex Business Models“
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“Ignorance is always ready to admire itself. Procure yourself critical friends.” Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
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“Whenever you see a spike in self-employment in this kind of economy, you know that is involuntary entrepreneurship,” Jared Bernstein “Defying Forecasts, Job Losses Mount for 22nd Month” (September, 2003)
Cited by Chris Anderson in “The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity” (May 2009)
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“Hasten slowly, and without losing heart,
Put your work twenty times upon the anvil.”
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
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“Companies aren’t generally structured to access, absorb or utilize customer insights since they are organized by product, not by customer.” Ranjay Gulati in “Seeing Customers as Partners in Innovation“
Full quote:
“Being customer-driven doesn’t mean asking customers what they want and then giving it to them. It’s about building a deep awareness of how the customer uses your product. Companies aren’t generally structured to access, absorb or utilize customer insights since they are organized by product, not by customer.” Hat tip to Mac Fowler
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“Look for an enterprise problem so bad that people will pay you to solve it and let you keep the software“.
Bill Paseman
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“There are really two killer apps for the next era of IT tech: collaboration and correlation”
James Watters in April 11 tweet
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“Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.”
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
Quoted in “Honesty in Negotiations”
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“We are like machines made up of redundant components, many of which are defective right from the start.”
Leonid Gavrilov & Natalia Gavrilova in “Why We Fall Apart” (IEEE Spectrum article)
Full quote:
“The quest to understand and control aging has led us, two biologists, to draw inspiration from what might seem an unlikely source: reliability engineering. The engineering approach to understanding aging is based on ideas, methods, and models borrowed from reliability theory. Developed in the late 1950s to describe the failure and aging of complex electrical and electronic equipment, reliability theory has been greatly improved over the past several decades. It allows researchers to predict how a system with a specified architecture and level of reliability of its constituent parts will fail over time.
The theory is so general in scope that it can be applied to understanding aging in living organisms as well. In the ways that we age and die, we are not so different from the machines we build. The difference, we have found, is minimized if we think of ourselves in this unflattering way: we are like machines made up of redundant components, many of which are defective right from the start.
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“Startups explore novel practices in chaotic environments, winnowing them into emergent practices for complex environments.”
Sean Murphy
I was inspired by Steve Blank’s “startups are the search to find order in chaos” and influenced by Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework
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“It is better to ask some of the questions than know all of the answers”
James Thurber from ‘The Scotty Who Knew Too Much” in “Fables for our Time“
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“The best money during the nascent years of a business is patient for growth but impatient for profit.”
Clayton Christensen in “The Innovator’s Solution”
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“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
Logan Pearsall Smith
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“That knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.”
Chuang Tzu
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“Startups are new businesses–not development projects—that need to discover a sustainable business model.”
William Pietri in “Responsible Technical Debt: Not an Oxymoron“
Full quote:
Startups are about learning. For this to make sense, you have to understand two things:
- Startups—even software startups—are businesses, not software development projects.
- The point of a startup isn’t to create a software product; it’s to discover a sustainable business model.
In a startup, software development isn’t an art for its own sake; what makes sense from a pure engineering perspective may not make sense more broadly. That’s true for any business really, but it’s especially true for a startup. That’s because the main goal of a startup is to discover a valuable business. Discovery requires experimentation, and the amount you can learn is a function of the cost of your experiments.
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“Pricing is the moment of truth—all of marketing comes to focus in the pricing decision.”
Raymond Corey
March 31st, 2010
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire, wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog, or purchase the E-book version at http://www.leanpub.com/skmurphy2
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“To have what you want is riches, to be able to do without is power.”
George MacDonald
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“And the man in the suit has just bought a new car,
From the profit he’s made on your dreams”
Jim Capaldi “The Low Spark of High Heel Boys”
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“The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”
Peter Drucker
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“Real world tests are all open book: lessons gleaned from the free market inexorably determine success.”
Jonathan Rosenberg
Full quote:
“In the real world the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market.” from Jeff Jarvis “TEDxNYed: This is Bullshit“
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“Our history is slow, continuous growth. In the race between tortoise and hare, well, we’re the slow guy”
Craig Newmark
This was Newmark’s answer to “How Craigslist Spread” is worth keeping as your screen saver quote. See also “Sustaining is More Important Than Starting”
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“A business should be run like an aquarium, where everybody can see what’s going on.” Jack Stack “The Great Game of Business” (page 72)
Full quote:
“A business should be run like an aquarium, where everybody can see what’s going on–what’s going in, what’s moving around, what’s coming out. That’s the only way to make sure people
understand what you’re doing, and why, and have some input into deciding where you are going. Then, when the unexpected happens, they know how to react and react quickly.”
The Great Game of Business site also lists simulations, webinars, coaching and more on open book management. See also “The Business is Everyone’s Business”
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“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” Mark Weiser in “The Computer for the 21st Century,” Scientific American, vol. 265 (September 1991): 94–104.
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“We missed good startups, usually good guys with a terrible idea. Now we focus more on the people than the idea.”
Paul Graham
Full quote from Hacker News Item 1192178:
“We’ve definitely missed good startups. But one advantage of having so many competitors is that we’re much more likely now to learn when we screw up. When a startup from one of the other YC-like organizations does well, I often check their YC application to see how we missed them. Usually it’s because they were good guys but working on a terrible idea, which they later changed. So in response to that we now make a conscious effort to pay less attention to the idea and more to the people when we read applications.”
In response to “Ask HN: Who got rejected in earlier cycles of YC application and made it anyway?”
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“Our plan for 2010: kill initiatives we can’t fix, experiment cautiously, and treat social capital with the same care as cash.”
Sean Murphy
See also “Conserving Trust in a Downturn” & “Bouncing Back”
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“The secret of happiness is curiosity”
Norman Douglas “The South Wind“
Full quote:
“A sound schooling should teach manner of thought rather than matter. It should have a dual aim—to equip a man for hours of work, and for hours of leisure. They interact; if the leisure is misspent, the work will suffer. As regards the first, we cannot expect a school to purvey more than a grip of general principles. Even that is seldom given. The second should enable a man to extract as much happiness as possible out of his spare time. The secret of happiness is curiosity. Now curiosity is not only not roused; it is repressed. You will say there is not time for everything. But how much time is wasted!”
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“Companies that truly want to create a long-term capability around innovation need to invest in building a common language.”
Dr. Clayton Christensen
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“A toolmaker succeeds when customers succeed with his aid: e.g. a sword-smith succeeds when clients die of old age.”
Fred Brooks
Full quote:
“A toolmaker succeeds as, and only as, the users of his tool succeed with his aid.
However shining the blade, however jeweled the hilt, however perfect the heft, a sword is tested only by cutting. That sword-smith is successful whose clients die of old age.”
Source: Fred Brooks “The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith”, Comm ACM 39(5), March 1996
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“Salvation comes to him who never ceases to strive.”
Goethe
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“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
Voltaire
February 28th, 2010
You can follow @skmurphy to get these hot off the mojo wire, wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog, or purchase the E-book version at http://www.leanpub.com/skmurphy2
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“When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.”
William Wrigley Jr.
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“Your brand is the promise that you keep.”
Kristin Zhivago
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“Plans are made, unmade, revised, and recast through action and interaction with others on a daily basis.”
Saras Sarasvathy
See also “Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model for Expert Entrepreneurs”
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“Ask for input only if you plan to do something with it or about it.”
Richard Moran “Nuts, Bolts, and Jolts“
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“Simple ain’t easy.”
Thelonious Monk
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“One competitor to customer development is a co-founder’s belief that product development, in and of itself, creates value.”
Sean Murphy
See also “Customer Development Proceeds in Parallel with Product Development”
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“Sometimes I am blocked by things I can see, other times by things I cannot. Too often, it’s just my fear of the unknown.”
Sean Murphy in in “Iron Bars, Plexiglass, and Masking Tape“
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“From a distance you look like an aircraft carrier, but as you get closer it becomes clear you are really a thousand canoes. ”
Rick Munden recounting a vendor’s description of TI
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“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Thomas Edison
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“The surest way to be cheated is to think oneself cleverer than other people.”
La Rochefoucauld
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