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We Must Think Less Like Engineers and More Like Gardeners

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We Must Think Less Like Engineers and More Like Gardeners

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In February, 1919, the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell received a card from his former student, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was at that time in an Italian prison camp. “I’ve written a book which will be published as soon as I get home,” he would say in subsequent correspondence. “I think I’ve solved our problems finally.”

The “problems” he spoke of had to do with a foundational crisis in mathematics and logic that defied the efforts of the world’s greatest minds. The book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was an attempt to engineer a perfectly logical language from first principles. It would become enormously influential, leading to the Vienna Circle and the logical positivist movement of the 1920s.

Yet Wittgenstein would later disown the idea and it was, in the end, found to be unworkable. There are limits to what we can engineer. The world is a messy place. Rules inevitably have exceptions, which is why every system will always crash. That’s why we need to think less like engineers making machines and more like gardeners that grow and nurture ecosystems.

The Death of the Secular Gods

The problems Russell and Wittgenstein were working on were part of a larger paradigm shift. By the late 19th century, many intellectuals had begun to question ideas passed down from the ancient Greeks, such as Aristotle’s Logic, Euclid’s geometry and the miasma theory in medicine, overturning two thousand years of conventional wisdom.

It’s hard to overstate the seismic shift that this represented. Aristotle’s use of the syllogism, in which conclusions necessarily followed premises, Euclid’s postulate that parallel lines never intersect and Hippocrates theory that bad air causes disease, were considered to be the basic foundations upon which western thought was predicated.

Yet as human knowledge advanced, people began to see flaws in these precepts. Strange paradoxes called Aristotle’s logic into question. Mathematicians like Gauss, Lobachevsky, Bolyai and Riemann began to imagine curved spaces in which parallel lines did, in fact, intersect and scientists such as Robert Koch, Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur established the germ theory of disease.

These would be, practically speaking, incredibly positive developments. The rise of non-Euclidean geometry made Einstein’s general theory of relativity possible and the germ theory of disease paved the way for antibiotics and much longer lifespans. Yet they created an unwarranted optimism about what the human mind could achieve.

A New Religion

In the early 20th century, science and technology emerged as a rising force in western society. The new wonders of electricity, automobiles and telecommunication were quickly shaping how people lived, worked and thought. Physicists like Einstein and Bohr became celebrities. It seemed that there was nothing that scientific precision couldn’t achieve.

It was against this backdrop that Moritz Schlick formed the Vienna Circle, which became the center of the logical positivist movement and throughout the 20’s and 30’s. At its core was Wittgenstein’s theory of atomic facts, the idea that the world could be reduced to a set of statements that could be verified as being true or false—no opinions or speculation allowed. Those statements, in turn, would be governed by a set of logical algorithms which would determine the validity of any argument.

Yet even as this logical movement was growing, the foundational crisis in logic continued. To solve the problem, David Hilbert the greatest mathematician of the era, proposed a program to solve the crisis that rested on three pillars. First, mathematics needed to be shown to be complete in that it worked for all statements. Second, mathematics needed to be shown to be consistent, no contradictions or paradoxes allowed. Finally, all statements need to be computable, meaning they yielded a clear answer.

Then things took a surprising turn. A young logician named Kurt Gödel would prove that every logical system is flawed with contradictions. Alan Turing would show that all numbers are not computable. The Einstein-Bohr debates would be resolved in Bohr’s favor, destroying Einstein’s vision of an objective physical reality and leaving us with an uncertain universe.

The Rise Of Faux Scientists

The verdict was in. Facts could never be absolutely verifiable, but would stand until they could be falsified. We could, after thorough testing, increase our confidence, but never be completely sure. Ironically, the demise of logic led directly to the era of digital computing and a new, technological age. Just as we learned that systems would always be fallible, the machines we built became unimaginably powerful.

At the same time, human agency was increasingly called into question. It was, after all, subjective judgements that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s and the enormous wars that followed it. As the Baby Boomers came of age in the 1960s, it seemed like everything was up for debate. All of the fuzziness and uncertainty of relying on human judgment increasingly seemed impractical.

Much like Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, a number of thinkers sought to engineer systems that would harness natural forces to create better outcomes. The Austrian School of economics eschewed government regulation in favor of consumer preferences. Neorealism in foreign relations argued that competition and conflict could govern that international order.

Yet unlike the original logical positivists, these ideas wouldn’t stay confined to academia, but would seep into the affairs of everyday people. The consumer welfare standard insisted that market price signals, not government bureaucrats, would decide if a transaction should be permitted, while the principle of shareholder value demanded that the stock market, not managers, should govern business decisions.

The results are clear. Too little antitrust regulation has increased concentration in the vast majority of American industries and strangled competition, which has decreased business dynamism and lowered productivity. Our economy has become markedly less productive, less competitive and less dynamic. Purchasing power for most people has stagnated. By just about every metric, we’re worse off.

We Need To Manage Ecosystems, Not Machines

We like to think of ourselves as rational actors, weighing each piece of evidence before making a decision. Yet our brains don’t work like that. We build up our perspectives through synapses in our brain and through our social networks, which form complex webs of influence. Once we adopt a point of view, we rarely adapt it to new evidence.

Engineers believe in laws that can be understood and put to specific use, so they build machines to perform specific tasks. Gardeners believe in complexity and emergence. They don’t design their garden as much as tend to it, nurture it and support its surrounding ecosystem. They don’t expect the same results every time, but understand they will need to adjust their approach as they go.

We need to think less like engineers and more like gardeners. For most important purposes, we manage ecosystems, not machines. We need to think more in terms of networks that grow and less in terms of nodes whose behavior we can predict and control. Our success or failure depends less on individual entities than the connections between them.

In a world driven by networks and ecosystems, we can no longer treat strategy as if it were a game of chess, planning out each move with near perfect precision and foresight. The task of leadership is to make decisions with full knowledge that many will be wrong and that you will need to make them right.

There’s no system to do that for us, no impersonal forces that will point the way. In the end, we have to put trust in ourselves. There isn’t anyone else.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Google Gemini

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Leaders Must Think Like Futurists as Change Accelerates

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Leaders Must Think Like Futurists as Change Accelerates

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

With war in Iran disrupting the global energy supply, AI breakthroughs threatening jobs, and political, demographic, and social forces colliding everywhere, we may be entering an age where disruption is the permanent new normal.

The question is what to do about it.

In this new age of constant acceleration, traditional approaches to planning are out the window. Leaders who rely on methods that worked in the past may find themselves reacting to events, forever firefighting, and playing catch-up. In an age defined by compounding disruptions, leaders cannot rely solely on incremental planning, quarterly metrics, or yesterday’s assumptions.

What this moment demands is a different discipline altogether: the ability to think like futurists and visionaries and reinvent how we navigate the future.

That was the central message delivered recently by leading futurist Rachel Hatch of the Institute for the Future, at the 2026 REACH Ideas and Action Summit in California’s Central Coast region. “The future is far too complex and uncertain and combinatorial to predict,” Hatch told the gathering of industry, government, and nonprofit leaders at the UC Santa Barbara campus.

“If someone’s pretending that they can predict the future, they probably shouldn’t be trusted. But what we can do is to help people think more systematically and creatively about how the future might be different. And adopt certain foresight tools to guide us forward.”

The Institute was founded in 1968 to study long-term societal and technological change. The Palo Alto, California, nonprofit conducts foresight research that helps businesses, governments, and nonprofits to map scenarios and better prepare for change.

Hatch and her fellow researchers collaborate with organizations as varied as the Episcopal Church, public transit agencies, universities, nonprofits, and economic development consortia such as REACH, which organized the one-day conference on the UCSB campus.

In times like these, noted Hatch, leaders must do two things at once: improvisation and imagination. “Most of you are already improvising all day long, responding to surprises, disruptions, funding shifts, political whiplash, labor shortages, new technologies, and changing expectations. But tapping your imagination, and opening the mental space to think deeply and systematically about what might come next, is often crowded out by urgency.”

To Hatch, this reactive leadership style is a mistake. In such environments, preparedness becomes a core leadership discipline. “Preparedness does not mean predicting the future with precision. It means developing the habits, mindsets, and frameworks that allow us to respond wisely to multiple plausible futures before they arrive at full force.”

Hatch made this point memorably by recalling an exercise the Institute conducted in 2008, led by IFTF colleague Jane McGonigal. Using a game called Superstruct, one of the scenarios the group explored was the possibility of an out-of-control global respiratory pandemic. Participants were invited to imagine a scenario where a virus went rogue and ponder, “If this were to happen, what would you do? How would you respond?”

One participant in the 2008 exercise mentioned digging old paint masks out of the garage. Another imagined supply chains breaking down. A third wondered how parents would work while simultaneously schooling their children at home. The value of the exercise, Hatch noted, was not that people would someday declare themselves “fully prepared to face a pandemic,” but that they developed what she called “a little bit more of a readiness posture” by allowing themselves to imagine a future they would rather not contemplate.

That phrase—readiness posture—is exactly right for today’s mass uncertainty and acceleration. And it encapsulates the value of futurist thinking. We cannot know with pinpoint accuracy which event will happen on which date. After all, the future is, as Hatch put it, “far too complex and uncertain and combinatorial” for that.

But we can think more systematically and creatively about how the future might be different, and we can use that thinking to make better choices now. Which is where the futurist tool of strategic foresight comes in.

Hatch defined foresight as “a set of tools, processes, and mindsets for developing strategy and making decisions under conditions of uncertainty.” Techniques can be taught. Tools can be adopted. Yet the hardest part is shifting our thinking and letting in different points of view. “Helping leaders loosen their grip on the ‘official future’ that they have been assuming will happen— takes humility, curiosity, and courage. And often a new mindset.”

Hatch identified several cognitive traps that make future-focused thinking difficult. One is the bias toward precision metrics: the belief that the more data we gather, the more certainty we possess. Data matters, of course. But when leaders become intoxicated by dashboards and forecasts, they often mistake numerical precision for strategic insight. The result is overconfidence, followed by disruption.

Another trap is what she calls “official futures.” Every organization has one: a default set of assumptions about what the market will do, how customers will behave, how technology will unfold, or what success will look like three years from now. These assumptions can create alignment, but they can also become blinders. As Hatch reminded her audience, Nokia once looked unassailable. The official future said so—right until it didn’t.

Then there is the deeply human issue of anxiety about change. Fear narrows imagination. Stress locks us into defensive postures. When people feel under threat, they want to protect the budget, the institution, the business model, the identity, the orthodoxy. But that instinct, however understandable, can make it harder to see emerging possibilities. In my language, this is why adaptability and anticipatory thinking must be cultivated before disruption peaks, not afterward.

Perhaps Hatch’s most fascinating insight came from neuroscience. Research suggests that when people think about their future selves, the brain often responds much as it does when thinking about a stranger. In other words, the future self can feel abstract, distant, and only weakly connected to the present self. That helps explain why leaders, institutions, and even regions so often underinvest in long-term resilience. The future feels real intellectually, but not viscerally.

So how do leaders overcome these traps? Hatch’s answer is both practical and powerful: collect signals of change. These are “vivid, surprising, specific observations about how the world is changing today.” They are not vague trend statements. They are concrete clues—new behaviors, strange business models, emerging technologies, shifting values—that reveal how the future is already arriving in uneven ways.

Futurist and science fiction writer William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” Hatch rightly brought that line into her lecture, and it speaks to one of the most under-appreciated disciplines in leadership: learning to spot the future early, while it is still scattered, local, and easy to dismiss.

Hatch’s examples were appropriately provocative. One involved a startup called Rent-a-Human, where AI agents deploy humans into the physical world to perform tasks they themselves cannot do. Another focused on the growing scale of prediction markets and what Hatch called the possible “gamblification economy,” in which younger generations (disillusioned about conventional paths to prosperity) turn increasingly to betting, speculation, and crypto as alternative financial strategies. These examples may sound fringe, even absurd. But as the pioneer of modern futures thinking Jim Dator observed, any useful statement about the future should sound ridiculous at first.

As a fellow futurist, what I especially appreciated was Hatch’s insistence that foresight must lead to action. “Foresight should never be about bright, shiny futures,” she said. “It’s not about naval gazing.” The point is not to marvel at novelty. The point is to make better decisions, allocate resources more wisely, and build stronger institutions while there is still time to do so.

When the pace of change was slower, leaders could get by with experience, instinct, and incremental adjustment. That era is over. In the Age of Acceleration, the advantage will go to those who can widen the time horizon, detect signals early, challenge the official future, and build what Rachel Hatch aptly calls a readiness posture.

Thinking like a futurist is no longer a niche exercise for specialists; it is becoming the defining leadership competency of our time.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Pexels

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The Psychology of Winning

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An Interview on Mindset and Agency

The Most Important Choice We Make is Choosing How to Think

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

I began my career interviewing thought leaders, futurists, innovators, and visionaries as a Los Angeles-based journalist. For the May 1982, edition of PSA Magazine, I interviewed renowned speaker and behavioral psychologist Dr. Denis Waitley, whose “Psychology of Winning” cassette learning system was riding high on bestseller lists, and Waitley’s calendar was full of speaking engagements.

Waitley’s ideas were pivotal in fueling my own career trajectory and belief system, for he and other human potential leaders opened my eyes to how far you can go if you work to control your thoughts and self beliefs. Waitley and I eventually wrote a book together called Winning the Innovation Game, and sadly, we have lost touch.

Nevertheless, when I came across this interview the other day, I thought about Waitley’s ideas on not blaming others (“the government,” “racism,” “the other party,” “the Deep State,” “growing up in poverty,” etc.), I couldn’t help notice how the pendulum has swung even more towards victimization. These days, we seem to be moving away from our own sense of agency (“If it’s going to be, it’s up to me”) and towards nursing grievances and blaming others for our lack of results, rather than taking responsibility for our lives and making it happen every day by the way we control our thoughts.

TUCKER: Of all the characteristics of high-achieving individuals that you’ve had a chance to observe, which one seems to define them best?

WAITLEY: It’s their understanding of the degree of control that their thoughts have over the actions that follow in their lives. Whether they happen to be astronauts or parents or prisoners of war, these people have taken responsibility for their own achievements. They’re self-managers.

TUCKER: What does that mean?

WAITLEY: Self-management is declaring that life is a do-it-to-myself project. Instead of just letting life happen, I’m going to make it happen for me, and I’m going to exercise the greatest freedom I have, which is the freedom of choice. The deepest, most significant choice we make is in the way we choose to think.

TUCKER: Isn’t controlling one’s thoughts one of the hardest things to do?

WAITLEY: No, but I think one of the hardest things to believe is that it can have any effect on your life. Almost all people believe that they are victims of environmental circumstances, the government, the weather, their horoscopes, certainly the economy. They feel they must wait for luck or fate or karma to change before they can have some effect on their lives. What’s hardest to understand is that we’re doing it every day, using our self-talk either for or against ourselves.

TUCKER: What do you mean by self-talk?

WAITLEY: We’re talking to ourselves every moment of our waking lives. It comes automatically. We’re seldom even aware that we’re doing it. We all have a running commentary going on in our heads on events and our reactions to them. By changing what you’re saying, you can change your behavior.

TUCKER: Should we consciously try to stop thinking negative thoughts by repressing doubts and fears?

WAITLEY: No. Those are natural emotions.

TUCKER: If you’re giving a speech, for instance, and you’re nervous, should you go ahead and admit it to the audience?

WAITLEY: No, because that is self-fulfilling and becomes a habit. It’s much better to go on and do it anyway and listen for positive responses from the audience and try to reward yourself for a successful speech. It’s not so much the performance that counts, because on any given day your performance will be good or not so good—a lot of factors affect your performance. But your response to it is what’s most important of all.

TUCKER: But people do have fears. Businesspeople worry constantly about a slump in their businesses, and salespeople worry about blowing a sale. Are you suggesting we shouldn’t verbalize those fears?

WAITLEY: I see the expression of fear as fine, but most fears and phobias are imaginary. A Michigan study found that 60 percent of our fears are totally unwarranted; 20 percent have already passed and are out of our control entirely; and another 10 percent are so petty that they don’t make any difference. Of the remaining 10 percent, only 4 or 5 percent are real and justifiable fears, And even of those, we couldn’t do anything about half of them! The other half we could easily solve by seeking out further information. Fear is not an effective emotion. It’s an emotion you should feel under physical danger.

TUCKER: How do you control your interior dialogue? What instructions can you offer?

WAITLEY: The self-talk of winners is affirmative and directed toward the results they want: after a poor performance, a winner would say, “That’s not like me, I can do better than that. I need more information about the target because I didn’t hit it. Therefore, I’ve either set the target too far off for right now, or I don’t have enough to go on.” The immediate self-talk of that performance should be, “target correction necessary.” After a good performance, on the other hand, the immediate feedback would be, “Now we’re getting somewhere. This is the way I see myself performing.” Non-high-performance individuals will have a good day or do something exceptional, but they’ll totally defeat themselves because they’ll have convinced themselves that it was a fluke.

TUCKER: So you believe in coaxing the mind toward the goal, almost talking to yourself?

WAITLEY: Absolutely. I believe in talking to myself in words, pictures, and emotions for a long time before a performance and just afterward. It’s even more important after a successful performance to assimilate it.

TUCKER: You recommend using simulation also as a way of improving performance. How does the system work?

Waitley: The neat thing about the brain is that it is a mimic of what we put into it in advance. Airline pilots have been using simulation for years. But it’s also a technique that businesspeople and everybody can practice, just by creating each experience that we want in our imagination first, before the event. The other day on a flight to Chicago, I was sitting next to a fellow who was making a weird, high-pitched humming noise, with his eyes closed. I turned the overhead air nozzle on his face and asked him if he wanted me to call the stewardess to come to his aid. It turned out that he was an oboist for the Chicago Symphony and he was practicing for that night’s performance. I met a world-champion Russian figure skater who told me that she rarely falls because she practices each sequence in her imagination at night with her eyes closed. She could probably perform her entire routine blindfolded with no hesitation. Simulation is the ability to do within when you’re without.

TUCKER: What is your primary message to those you teach?

WAITLEY: That the period of time we’re living in is no worse than any other period in history, and probably better. Because problems are normal and inherent with change. And since society is changing rapidly, it’s up to the individual to view change as normal and to see many of the changes taking place as positive rather than negative. But we’re not historians by nature. So we’re not apt to say, let’s look at what happened in the past for guidance. There’s such an incredible focus in society on deviant behavior, bad news, and things going wrong that most people take it all on their shoulders. They feel that things were better before and will probably be better at some unpredictable point in the future called “someday.”

TUCKER: Do you consider yourself a psychologist first or a motivator?

WAITLEY: I’m a motivational trainer first. I teach people how to view the world, how to view themselves in the world, and how to establish some rules of conduct toward their personal and professional lives. So in effect, I’m a performance enhancer. I consider myself a psychologist second, although I’m constantly trying to make sure that the techniques, I’m applying have some basis in fact and have been researched.

TUCKER: What do your audiences want from you?

WAITLEY: They think what motivation is is a pump up, let’s-go-out-there-and-kill-’em mentality. Motivation has been one of the most misunderstood, oversold words I’ve ever come across. What researchers have found is that the old locker-room psych-up causes you to peak too early. The adrenaline athletes have pumped up in the locker room tends to make them overanxious, and they make mistakes. They go out there, and instead of being relaxed and knowing exactly what they’re going to do, they’re actually too aroused to think. The new way is to have quiet time in the locker room —this applies to both Olympic and Super Bowl athletes- when athletes sit and listen to soft music and rehearse in their imaginations the game they know they are capable of playing because they’re prepared. And it’s really the same situation in life if you think about it.

TUCKER: Why is it more important to replay a successful performance than to analyze a bad one?

WAITLEY: Because most of us don’t spend enough time preparing for or simulating success in advance, and we aren’t prepared for it when we achieve it. We haven’t spent enough time thinking about how good it is going to feel to be successful. For whatever reason we become successful, we don’t completely understand it. And because of this, we don’t feel deserving of it; it comes upon us like instant stardom or winning the sweepstakes. Right away, our self-talk begins to tear down the success, and we get back to where we were before or we go back to being our “practiced selves.”

TUCKER: Of the high-achieving people you’ve observed, do they seem to be

goal-oriented?

WAITLEY: It’s definitely a common denominator of successful people. I find that the most common problem with people who never reach their goals is that they never set them. It isn’t that goals are unreachable; it’s that most people never take the time to write them down. They spend more time planning Christmas or a vacation than they do their lives. I’ll ask people what they are going to do in 1983 and they’ll say, “Who can tell? It depends on whether Reaganomics works.” Then I’ll ask, “What are you going to be doing by 1985?” they’ll reply, “Well, it will probably be worse, with the interest rates and all. We don’t have any idea.”

TUCKER: What’s your method for setting goals?

WAITLEY: I believe it’s best to write out your life goals first, the things you want to do in the long range. Then, break down your goals into intermediate ones: What do you want to accomplish in the next three years? What do you intend to accomplish in the next six months? And then, after you’ve done this, how are you going to achieve them? It’s very important to be specific; not just that you want to be happy. You want to be happy in what way? Do you want to be happy with your children at night when you come home? To answer these questions, you’ll have to put down certain affirmative statements that will project you toward your goals.

TUCKER: What do you say to people who reach their goals and find that they still aren’t happy?

WAITLEY: If your goals are symbols of success—a mansion, a yacht, a certain position in business or in the university—those I call shallow and superficial targets. If your goal was to make a million dollars and you made it, you’d find it shallow, because no one really cares. It isn’t the achievement of the million dollars that’s important; it was the process you went through in achieving it. So, goal setters have to be careful. They must understand that life itself is a process and that there is a big picture, that they fit into the big universe and that the most successful people look beyond themselves and their own goals for meaning and purpose in life.

These people are the ones who are busy planting shade trees under which they know they’ll never sit. The biggest fools are the ones who look at the destination as the answer and not the process of the journey as being important. But it’s equally foolish to go out there and just journey without having a destination.

TUCKER: What role does ambition play in your psychology of winning?

WAITLEY: A great one. Ambition is the role of imagination. It’s simply a desire for change or a dissatisfaction with the status quo. A desire for change means that I can see something out there that is better than what I have.

TUCKER: You mentioned earlier that we Americans may be working so hard that we may not be taking enough time to relax and reflect. What do you recommend as ways to keep from becoming too narrowly focused in one’s work?

WAITLEY: I think reading the best-selling nonfiction books is important. And if you don’t have time to read those, then definitely read the digests of them. They even have digests of medical breakthroughs, and they’re starting to put these digests on tape, so that what we used to think of as downtime in rush-hour traffic can be come in your auto-classroom. Attending seminars and lectures of all kinds, is important. Even more important is talking to people who have different views from yours.

TUCKER: Do you advocate having a specific daily routine?

WAITLEY: I’m a big believer in a success routine if the things you are doing are really beneficial. That might include getting up half an hour earlier, to ask yourself, “What is the most important thing I can do today that’s going to benefit me and those close to me?” Unfortunately, routines often end up stifling growth; we start resting on our laurels, becoming complacent, thinking about retirement. And then some young Turk comes along who’s not in a routine and can knock you right off your perch.

TUCKER: The direct opposite of resting on one’s laurels would be continually innovating, and continually undertaking new projects. What are your thoughts on that?

WAITLEY: I have a rule for that. If you’re just starting to succeed, keep repeating the success, and don’t innovate at the beginning of a successful pattern, but continue until you have succeeded for some time. Once you’re successful in your own eyes and in the eyes of the audience, then diversify, because people will help you do anything you want to after you are successful in each field.

TUCKER: In your book, The Psychology of Winning, you talk about creating a model for yourself. Could you explain the idea?

WAITLEY: Throughout the first half of most people’s lives they operate under a system of trial and error. Finally, we get smart through our failures and begin to repeat a success. It’s a heck of a way to live, yet everyone says you must go through it. But you really don’t. What is important is for a person to find a role model or a success model of someone who seems similar in intelligence and maybe even background, and maybe in a similar field. The only difference is that this model has had a great deal more success. Modeling is looking at other people’s lives, how they do what they do, interviewing them, reading about them, listening to them, really studying them, and finding out how they do it.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pexels

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – June 3, 2012

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“When all think alike, then no one is thinking.”

– Walter Lippman

“When it comes to creating an innovation culture, often people make it far too complicated. If you’re part of the senior leadership team and you’re serious about innovation then your job is simple – reduce friction.”

– Braden Kelley

“Nothing is so embarrassing as watching someone do something that you said could not be done.”

– Sam Ewing

What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 6, 2012

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“You can get anything in life you want if you help enough other people get what they want.”

– Zig Ziglar
– Submitted by Paul Toussaint

“An innovation leader’s job isn’t to provide the answers but to provoke the thinking that gets you there.”

– Braden Kelley

What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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