On Climate

‘No one ever had an idea in a dress suit.’
— Sir Frederick G. Banting

‘Creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance.’
— Julie Cameron

‘People must know that their ideas will be listened to and, if they have merit, acted upon. If they do, it is possible to mobilize individual creativity on a very broad scale.’
— James Champy

‘It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.’
— Albert Einstein

‘If you want the best things to happen in corporate life you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person. You don’t get innovation as a democratic process. You almost get it as an anti-democratic process. Certainly you get it as an antithetical process, so you have to have an environment where the body of people are really amenable to change and can deal with the conflicts that arise out of change an innovation.’
— Max DePree

‘The whole business starts with ideas, and we’re convinced that ideas come out of an environment of supportive conflict, which is synonymous with appropriate friction.’
— Michael Eisner

‘All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.’
— Hermann Hesse

‘You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.’
— Steve Jobs

‘Men live upon trust.’
— John Locke

‘We need to make the world safe for creativity and intuition, for it is creativity and intuition that will make the world safe for us.’
— Edgar Mitchell

‘I consider it my job to nurture the creativity of the people I work with because at Sony we know that a terrific idea is more likely to happen in an open, free and trusting atmosphere than when everything is calculated, every action analysed and every responsibility assigned by an organisation chart.’
— Akio Morita

‘Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.’
— George S. Patton

‘We’re in the age of the idea. The organization that can develop a culture of creativity and idea generation will be the winners.’
— Kevin Roberts

‘Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.’
— Mark Twain

‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.’
— Orson Welles