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.

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."

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.

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.'

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.

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.