Stephen Elop Quotes

It's not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project.

You have to think that the answer - and the right answer - for you and your organization might not be something that's been done before. And it's up to you to discover and work with your team to form and figure out how to do successfully.

Man owes his success to his creativity. No one doubts the need for it. It is most useful in good times and essential in bad.

An open-minded person running a business might catch a problem faster than a closed-minded person. And when they identify a problem, they can fix it much faster.

America demands invention and innovation to succeed.

It's amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.

To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.

Doing it your own way, not having to go exactly by the book to be successful.

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

If you wait for customers to tell you that you need to do something, you're too late. Good business leaders should be half a step ahead of what customers want, i.e. they don't actually quite know they want it. That's what innovation's about. With Plan A, we didn't wait for the consumers to tell us.

Imagination is an instrument of survival.

To recognize negativism as a force of creation is to give up the creative standpoint altogether.

It's always the organizations that are resource constrained that come up with the good ideas to win.

I think being open-minded about what Nature is trying to tell you is the key to being creative and successful.

Creativity is not just for artists. It's for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.

Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

I am always looking for options that yield something unexpected.

Remember: you cannot build a better mouse trap by fixing the old one - NewCo demands active ownership, and that activity is not the sum of doing multiple jobs but, instead, the sum of implementing paradigm-shifting changes that create new industries and solutions.

The basic DNA we've got to implant in leaders now is adaptability: not to get wedded to the solution to a particular problem, because not only the problem but the solution changes day to day. Creating people who are hardwired for that is going to be our challenge for the future.

I had noticed that many of these successful people, historical and contemporary, shared certain common traits. They had a way of thinking that was exceptionally fluid; they could adapt to almost any circumstance; when confronted with problems, they could look at them from novel perspectives and solve them.

FCA is a culture of leaders and employees that were born out of adversity and who operate without sheet music.

We've got to be entrepreneurial; we've got to be innovative, and we've got to figure out ways of getting things done that people might think are very unorthodox.

I always look for a challenge. Maybe it's part of my mentality to create something special.

To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection.

Part of being the successful Pixar is that we will take risks on teams and ideas, and some of them won't work out. We only lose from this if we don't respond to the failures. If we respond, and we think it through and figure out how to move ahead, then we're learning from it. That's what Pixar is.