Gary Hamel Quotes

Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.

It is the creative and enterprising spirit of people that is indispensable. Everything else is supplemental.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.

There are people who say that you can't experiment... That condemns you to failure.

Americans understand that one of our great national strengths is innovation. Great innovators - Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others - are household names.

Entrepreneurs are misfits to the core. They forge ahead, making their own path and always, always, question the status quo.

It is the essence of innovation to fail most of the time.

Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you're not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you're not going to make progress.

When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

I think when you take the big swings - and I've done plenty of big swings that I was told were never going to work - those are always the things that break through.

I don't know if there's a genetic marker for entrepreneurship. But if there is, it's most likely not a genius for planning. It's a propensity for action - and the ability to put failure behind you quickly. To stop being precious about your ideas.

... if you take a risk, two things will happen. People will laugh at you. Or you'll be way ahead of everybody else. And if that's what you're in it for, then you gotta take that risk.

Being an entrepreneur doesn't make you a rich tycoon and being an innovator doesn't mean that you're successful. It just means that you're interesting.

When you prohibit failure, you kill innovation.

Success shuns the man who lacks ideas.

If everything you do works, then you're not taking many risks and probably aren't innovating either.

Friends and family will tell you why your ideas won't work. Most are left-brained employees and specialists and NOT entrepreneurs.

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.

Move fast, take risks, it's okay to try big things you're better off trying something and having it not work and learning from that than having not done anything at all.

Don't let people tell you your ideas won't work. If you're passionate about an idea that's stuck in your head, find a way to build it so you can prove to yourself that it doesn't work.

I've certainly had a number of failures along the way, depending on my own instincts and creativity, some fairly celebrated, at least during their time.

If you can last long enough, in success, you have to get really creative and come up with new stuff.