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.

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.

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.

We Galvins define leadership as 'taking people elsewhere.'

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.

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.