The trouble with much of the advice business is getting today about the need to be more vigorously creative is, essentially, that its advocates have generally failed to distinguish between the relatively easy process of being creative in the abstract and the infinitely more difficult process of being innovationist in the concrete.

You want to dig your well where you have the best chance of finding water with the least amount of digging

A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action.

Ideas can be willed, and the imagination is their engine.

All organizations are hierarchical. At each level people serve under those above them. An organization is therefore a structured institution. If it is not structured, it is a mob. Mobs do not get things done, they destroy things.

Though progress starts with the imagination, only work can make things happen. And work itself works best when fueled, again by the imagination.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want to buy a quarter-inch hole!