Warren Bennis Quotes

The new idea either finds a champion or it dies. No ordinary involvement with a new idea provides the energy required to cope with the indifference and resistance that change provokes.

People resist change; if they like something, then they want you to keep doing it over and over - but I think if you like what a particular band or artist does, then you should want to see what they're going to do next.

The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.

Anyone in a large organization who thinks major change is impossible should probably get out.

A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.

These days, the problem isn't how to innovate; it's how to get society to adopt the good ideas that already exist.

Ideas Are The Lifeblood Of Business. Capture Every Fleeting Idea And Drive For Change.

Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.

We Experiment Endlessly, With New Products, New Methods, New Companies And New Marketing. A Successful Business The Emphasis Is On Experiment And Development, Ideas Are The Lifeblood Of Business.

The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.

People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.

Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability and to prevent, or at least slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change.

Ideas really do matter. But in any organization a good idea will only go so far unless its proponents are willing to fight the political games to get the idea adopted.

Baseball people are generally allergic to new ideas; it took years to persuade them to put numbers on uniforms, and it is the hardest thing in the world to get Major League Baseball to change anything—even spikes on a new pair of shoes—but they will eventually...they are bound to.

The paradox of innovation is this: CEO's often complain about lack of innovation, while workers often say leaders are hostile to new ideas.

The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action-fast.

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change.

Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.

If there's a new idea, a new invention, or a new gas, or a new whatever you know, It should be brought at least into the open instead of carrying these same old burdens around with you.

Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.

A conditioned mind may be inventive; it may think up new ideas, new phrases, new gadgets; it may build a dam, plan a new society, and all the rest of it; but that is not creativity. Creativity is something much more than the mere capacity to acquire a technique. It is because this extraordinary thing called creativity is not in most of us that we are so shallow, empty, insufficient. And only the mind that is free can be creative.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens.But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.