Quote Of The Week

Quote of the Week 21 “ Research is the transformation of money into knowledge; innovation is the transformation of knowledge into money. ” ―  Geoffrey Nicholson Triggered by a discussion on LinkedIn. Generated by X/Grok 3

Quote of the Week 34 “If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.” ―   Linus Pauling   Source: Timespinner Press (Michael Dobson) Triggered by the use of a variant of the quote in a recent talk " Can LLMs Reason & Plan? " (slide 24) by Subbarao Kambhampati . “I get many ideas, and I throw away the bad ones.” Dear @aclmeeting Community: I was privileged to speak, and have invigorating conversations nonstop with many of you from 9AM-10:30PM today. For an old professor like me, this is pig's heaven! 🤗 Thank you for your kindness!🙏 Slides of my talk https://t.co/2iP0OwimG3 Audio… pic.twitter.com/FGAzSPEXEl — Subbarao Kambhampati (కంభంపాటి సుబ్బారావు) (@rao2z) August 13, 2024

Quote of the Week 23 " Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic . " ― Arthur C. Clarke   ( Clarke's 3rd Law ) Adapted by Grey's Law : " Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice ."

Quote of the Week 30 " Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought. " ―  Albert Szent-Györgyi Triggered by a @ProfFeynman tweet . [Update: 09/17/2025] The original quote is attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer.

Quote of the Week 28 " Proximity does breed creativity within a group of people." ― Kara Swisher Triggered by Kara's claim in a recent Pivot Podcast episode: . @karaswisher explains that there are some real advantages to working in-person in the office: “Proximity does breed creativity within a group of people.” Stream Pivot here, presented by @Salesforce + 👉 https://t.co/wo1l2mMrMP pic.twitter.com/coSLj8xTsS — Pivot Podcast (@PivotPod) June 3, 2022 Unfortunately, I could not yet find a research study that fully backs this opinion. While the creativity myth   "Creativity tends to be a solitary activity" has been challenged, " face-to-face verbal interaction is typically not an effective way to tap the creative potential of a group "   according to  Alone versus together: Finding the right balance for creativity (researchgate.net) . [Update: July 17, 2022 Proximity does indeed cause contagion within a group of people. ]

Quote of the Week 27 " By far the greatest flow of newness is not innovation at all. Rather, it is  imitation ." ― Theodore Levitt "Imitation is not only more abundant than innovation, but actually a much more prevalent road to business growth and profits." Triggered by the inflationary u se of the term "innovation" in marketing new products. Theodore Levitt already diagnosed the same more than half a decade ago in his 1966 Harvard Business Review article "Innovative Imitation" summarized here . [ Post | LinkedIn ]

2nd Quote of the Week 25 " Creativity is a spiritual experience, not a mental experience." ―  Deepak Chopra Triggered by the interview with Deepak Chopra @ OpenText World EMEA 2022 in Munich. See  Creativity (blog-on-innovation.blogspot.com)  for a brief overview of the concept of creativity summarized by another Chopra quote: " To harness true creativity, you must silence the conditioned mind."

Quote of the Week 24 " You can’t copy your way to the top ." ―  Steven B. Sample ( The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership ) Cited in Contingency Theories for Leadership . Source:  DALL·E mini - a Hugging Face Space by dalle-mini More counter-intuitive lessons from the book : Never make a decision today that can reasonably be put off to tomorrow. Think gray. Don’t form opinions if you don’t have to. Think free. Move several steps beyond traditional brainstorming. Listen first, talk later. And when you listen, do so artfully. Shoot your own horse. Don’t force others to do your dirty work. The best leaders don’t keep up with the popular media and the trades. Know what hill you are willing to die on—and keep its exact location to yourself. Know the all–important difference between being leader and doing leader. You can’t copy your way to the top.

Quote of the Week 15 " Good artists copy. Great artists steal." ― Misattributed to Pablo Picasso Source: Quote Investigator

Quote of the Week 49 " Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. " ―  Nikola Tesla Cited here in context: " The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."

Quote of the Week 29 "Software doesn’t age like fine wine; it ages like milk.   Software goes bad over time." ― Josh Corman Related quotes: "Code doesn't age like wine, it ages like milk." ― Chris Eng Triggered by Charity Major's use of a variation of the quote   "Software on the shelf doesn't age like wine; it ages like milk." in her  presentation  on Continuous Delivery where she argues that  software should be auto-deployed within 15 minutes after you merge it, with no manual gates.   Photo by Debby Hudson  on Unsplash The use of the full quote by Josh Corman can be found in a 2016 article . A later  blog article  acknowledges prior usage @ Microsoft. The attribution to Chris Eng has been made in a Lenovo presentation  (slide 9) and a CSO Online article  (cited here ). The origin of the quote, however, dates back to at least 2006 when Andy Ozment and Stuart E. Schechter authored a Usenix conference paper titled " Milk or Wi...

Quote of the Week 26 " Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs. " ―  Bill Gates Source: "No Single Metric Captures Productivity" by Ciera Jaspan, Caitlin Sadowski, Google; Chapter 2  in: Caitlin Sadowski, Thomas Zimmermann, "Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering"  See  my Blog On Innovation  for a summary of key takeaways from the book.

Quote of the Week 25 " Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas . " ―  UK Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) Source: " Innovate to Accumulate " (1994) Triggered by the inflationary usage of the term " innovation " lacking a universally accepted definition. Or as Graham West already put it back in 1994: "Sadly, the word “innovation”, in recent usage, has become so hackneyed it seriously runs the risk of metamorphosizing into an expression of a doubtful quality." See also my Blog On Innovation article for a collection of alternative definitions of the term.

Quote of the Week 17 "The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better." ― Doug Engelbart Source:  Inventor Of Computer Mouse Dies; Doug Engelbart Was 88

Quote of the Week 52 " The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. " ― George Bernard Shaw See also:   LinkedIn   post.