Quotes for Entrepreneurs – May 2008

Continuing my twitter experiment from April I try to select a good quote every couple of days that is applicable to the challenges of entrepreneurship.  I collect these quotes for entrepreneurs into a blog post at the end of the month. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.

Quotes for Entrepreneurs – May 2008

“Practice is the best of all instructors.”
Publilius Syrus

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“You can’t hire someone to practice for you.”
H. Jackson Brown, Jr. see also his “21 Suggestions for Success“

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“Being yourself is not remaining what you were, or being satisfied with what you are. It is the point of departure.”
Sydney J. Harris

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“Innovation is the first reduction to practice of an idea in a culture.”
James Brian Quinn in “Intelligent Enterprise: A Knowledge and Service Based Paradigm for Industry“

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“The First Step Toward Getting Somewhere Is To Decide That You Are Not Going To Stay Where You Are.”
J. Pierpont Morgan

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“Intelligence is defined by prediction. ”
Jeff Hawkins

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“HTML is now the default document format: a WYSIWYG editor for it is long overdue”
Kevin Marks in “Misunderstanding the Innovator’s Dilemma“

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“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
Roy Amara

This is also called “Amara’s Law” and often incorrectly attributed to Paul Saffo, see Rex Hammock’s “So what exactly did Paul Saffo say and when did he say it?” where recaps a 2004 email from Paul Saffo:

“The idea that we overestimate short-term effects and under-estimate long-term implications of emergent technological change comes from an observation of the last 100-odd years of technology diffusion. As best as I know, Roy Amara, IFTF’s first president, was the first person to explicitly note this phenomenon, and thus at IFTF, we often refer to it as Amara’s law. I started talking about it publically in 1985, and Roy had been talking about it for at least 10 years before that.

But like all good ideas, this has multiple roots and multiple contributors. For example, Ev Rogers authored a seminal book on technology diffusion title “Diffusion of Innovations” — first published in 1962, with multiple subsequent editions. Ev’s work is what brought s-curves to the attention of audiences beyond the history of technology community. In the mid-80s, “hockey-stick curves” became a focus of attention in Silicon Valley, often derided because of the frequency of its appearance in start-up business plans. Ultimately, the hockey-stick portion of the curve was memorialized by Andy Grove and his references to the “inflection point” — the point at which the curve takes off.

My small contribution (I think) to all this was to focus on the neglected part of the S-curve — the flat part of the curve before the inflection point. In the mid-80s, I began arguing that understanding the flat part was crucial to making sense of the innovation process, and that it revealed that even in Silicon Valley, diffusion was remarkably slow. I also argued in the same period that the then much derided “hype” was in fact a crucial part of the diffusion cycle, an element of communities persuading themselves to cause change to occur. In this regard, I did react with some surprise years later when Gartner began pitching their “hype-cycle,” but simply assumed that they had independently come to the same conclusion as I had years earlier and hadn’t noticed by essays on the topic.

Update Jan-2018: I came across this quote that predates the earliest credited to Amara by a decade:

“Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next ten.”
Neil Armstrong in an address to a Joint Session of Congress, Sep-16-1969

I used the Armstrong quote in “Ten from Safia Abdalla’s ‘Things I learned in 2017’” as a closing quote for the section labeled “Few people notice the changes that matter because they happen very slowly.” I also used it in the “Play a Long Game” section of  “The Shape of Firms to Come: Key Values and Architectural Philosophy.” This insight by Armstrong  predates “Amara’s Law” by at least a decade and may have inspired him.