Joe Kaeser Quotes

It's difficult to do something radically new, unless you are at the heart of a company.

Many Chinese companies are run like military camps with military discipline. We do not run a company that way. It does not help the creative process.

The cool part about working for Disney is that they've allowed me to be a change agent.

As we continue to grow, the question is, how do you keep the company as innovative as it was 15 employees ago?

The culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation. If you break the culture, you break the machine that creates your products.

All too often, a corporate innovation initiative starts and ends with a board meeting mandate to the CEO followed by a series of memos to the staff, with lots of posters and one-day workshops. This typically creates 'innovation theater' but very little innovation.

Innovation in an existing company is not just the sum of great technology, key acquisitions, or smart people. Corporate innovation needs a culture that matches and supports it.

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.

For people on my side of the cubicle, the goal is always creativity. Spending your time overcoming corporate resistance to creativity - I just don't want to do that.

Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business.

Bill Gore from Goretex was a very strong influence because he was one of the first larger companies to experiment with freedom in the workplace.

The Macintosh having shipped, his next agenda was to turn the rest of Apple into the Mac group. He had perceived the rest of Apple wasn't as creative or motivated as the Mac team, and what you need to take over the company are managers, not innovators or technical people.

Basic philosophy, spirit and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing.

It really hasn't been demonstrated at any level by any major corporation that it can nurture what is euphemistically called creativity.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.

Innovation and corporate governance are extremely important to improve the profitability of Japanese companies and encourage them to increase wages, capital spending, and dividends.

About half the people at Valve have run their own companies, so they always have the option not just to take a job at another game company, but to go start their own company. The question you always have to answer is, 'How are we making these people more valuable than they would be elsewhere?'

When you're 17 and you have an idea, people don't really listen to you. I came out of an environment where my parents were always pushing me to do what I wanted and be creative, and I was not used to the industry's way of thinking.

Companies are not ingenious, it's the people in them that are.

I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement.

Culture is the silent killer of innovation.

It's up to the person who's being creative to find ways to emerge and shake up the world of wealth.

If you give the boss all the decision-making power, they see the world through their eyes. The big innovations are generally such a shift that they won't see it. For a long time, it looked like it was just inevitable that you would get slow and bureaucratic.

There is no science in creativity. If you don't give yourself room to fail, you won't innovate.

When you care about people's happiness and productivity, you give them what brings out the best in them and their creativity. And if you give them a choice, they'll say, 'I want an iPhone,' or 'I want a Mac.' We think we can win a lot of corporate decisions at that level.