Christopher Galvin Quotes

Leading innovation can be a uniquely lonely and unpopular thing because most of the time, you have to stand by yourself saying, "Everybody sees the world this way. I see the world another way."

If you want to be an innovator, you have to take risks. And sometimes things work and sometimes they don't work.

You have to give credit where credit's due. Steve [Jobs] has been probably the single hardware/software forward-looking thinker and executor in our lifetime as an individual. He's quite a brilliant innovator.

We Galvins define leadership as 'taking people elsewhere.'

What most people don't understand about failure in innovation is that it's an investment. It's actually an investment in experience.

When does your next idea come? You don't really know yet, and therefore there's a lot of uncertainty associated with innovation companies. Most often, the true innovators have to stand all by themselves at the beginning and predict that the world will be different.

Once people have tried to do something they think is uniquely innovative and it doesn't work, they're actually now more valuable because they know what not to try the next time, or what to try differently.

The Galvins like to think about certain things that most people think are impossible, and then we like to engage a process to try to make them possible.

The way that Wall Street works is most people like very steady quarterly earnings, and they like to be very popular instead of unpopular and they don't like to be the nail that sticks up, as they say.

While we very much regret the impact this will have on certain employees, we must adjust our production capacity to the reality of current business conditions and reduce costs to improve overall financial performance.

I took a long view in order to not destroy the core Galvin-defined principles imbued in Motorola, such as constant respect for people, its instincts for breakthrough innovation, and continuous renewal in thinking and process rigor.