The most innovative designers consciously reject the standard option box and cultivate an appetite for thinking wrong.

Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.

You can't be a leader by following a leader.

I see "demand creation" as a 20th-century construct that's bound up with advertising. It's an outmoded view of marketing that says, "First, we build a product or service, then we advertise it into people's lives." Embedded this view is the belief that companies control brands. This is a myth. My message all along has been that brands are actually created by customers, not companies. Companies only provide the raw materials - the products, messaging, behaviors - that people use these to create brands.

When enough individuals arrive at the same gut feeling, a company can be said to have a brand.

Without design thinking, the only sane response to a problem is to make a smaller, "safer" move. Smaller moves don't get you very far. They key is to let out the leash on imagination, but not take it off the leash. Imagination is the only path to innovation. It's a good example of something that humans do better than machines.

Cultures are naturally resistant to change. The same shared mental models that allow large numbers of people to work together efficiently can also keep people from imagining new ways of working together. In many corporate cultures, new ideas are viewed as heresy. But it doesn't have to be that way.