Roger von Oech Quotes

I have always emphasized the willingness to discard.

There's been a lot of role reversal going on in the band. The roles people have been playing for a long time will always be there, but everybody's willing to try on different outfits.

I've worked with a lot of first time directors; in fact, I enjoy it because there is a certain beginner's mind that they bring into a project that isn't loaded with the way things have been done before. There's a certain freedom to it.

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

Why should we hesitate to toss the old views overboard.

It's difficult sometimes to, in effect, let go of how you're used to doing things and give the brand room to be reinvented.

Clinging to old ways and fighting change is not the answer.

I don't think one should be a slave to one medium.

I like to leave a little room to innovate and change things around while I'm working.

The wind of change, whatever it is, blows most freely through an open mind.

I never want to feel like the way that I see it isthe only way. Sometimes mistakes happen and that's better than whatyou thought the scene could be. You allow room for the possibilities.

I find that it's almost essential to fall in love with an idea to invest the time it takes to make it good and worth sharing. And then, the hard part: deleting that idea when it's just not what it could be. Too often, organizations are good at the first part, but struggle with the second. And so we defend expired business models, support the status quo and have a knee-jerk inclination to preserve what we've got.

It can be scary to find out you've been wrong about something but we can't be afraid to change our minds, to accept that things are different, that they'll never be the same, for better or for worse. We have to be willing to give up what we used to believe. The more we're willing to accept what is and not what we thought, we'll find ourselves exactly where we belong.

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

Above all, you must remain open and fresh and alive to any new idea.

That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.

A rolling stone gathers no moss and therefore will not be derided as a moss-back. Roll as much as possible.

Securities, certitudes and peace do not lead to discoveries.

An acting teacher once told me, 'Greet everything with yes... Even if you abandon one idea for another one, saying yes allows you to move forward.'

Take a chance. Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. And don’t fall in love with Plan A.

we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next new comes along.

Take all the rules away. How can we live if we don't change?

I'm not old school, like, "Aw, man, I gotta do my music like I did in '98." I just go with the flow. I don't try to change anything.

Hiring people with diverse backgrounds brings in a flexibility of thought and openness to new ways of doing things, as opposed to hiring clones from business schools who have been taught a codified way of doing business.