John C. Mather Quotes

If you really want to step up your team's creative thinking, take a hard look at how many people you're putting in a room together. More than three to five is probably too many.

Creative collaboration is awesome.

The natives of Silicon Valley learned long ago that when you share your knowledge with someone else, one plus one usually equals three. You both learn each other's ideas, and you come up with new ones.

I do a lot of brainstorming with my editors.

Being able to chuck ideas around and bounce ideas off each other with anyone I'm working with is just something I love to do, that's how most of these ideas are formed.

Two heads are better than one.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

We can arrive at better solutions to any problem or pain together, than we can by ourselves. The beauty of the modern age is that you are able to source answers, and sometimes the genius is in the combination of ideas and energy that does not reside in only one person.

No one person, no one alliance, no one nation, no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.

If I collaborate with people, ideas...they take interesting turns and twists, and I'm excited for that and that process and excited to see what we come up with.

If you put enough smart people together in one space, good things happen.

The employees who share innovative ideas may also be the folks who have some hidden talents that would help incorporate their suggestions.

I really challenge every actor at the beginning of a process, and I always say, 'I have an idea that I'm going to bring to the table. I hope and expect that you will have an idea and bring it to the table. But the way I really want to work is that together we're going to have a third idea that is better than either of our ideas.'

What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It's not that the network is smart.

The best work for creative folks on the team is when the problem is big and the solution escapes everyone.

Where two take counsel there is no lack of plans.

I'm not under too much of an illusion of how smart or un-smart I am because filmmaking ultimately is about teamwork.

I not only use all the brains I have but I borrow what I can from everyone about me.

I need, sometimes, individuals to spark an idea so that I can take off running.

Every scene is on the table to collaborate on, to pick apart, to try a million different ways. Usually, what ends up occurring in the end is something that no single person knew would happen or had planned for.

You can be stuck for two weeks on a problem, and then you get the right couple of people in a room, and in five minutes, you get a great answer.

We've been astonished by how good groups working together can predict the outcomes of events.

I've always been a collaborator. For me, it's, 'What's the issue I'm trying to solve? Who are the people we need to bring around the table to solve it?'

I think that's the beauty of the collaboration with a team. In the end, it never turns out how you imagine, it always is this amalgam of bringing in different perspectives.

What I like best is sitting in a room together with really smart engineers thinking about a problem.