Bill Drayton Quotes

Coming up with a way to fix mistakes challenges your creativity and your critical thinking skills and your resourcefulness. Often you end up with something better than what you planned on in the first place.

When you have an employee who's innovative in your organization, what are they thinking about in the shower? If they're working in an exciting place, they're not thinking what they're going to do over the weekend. They're thinking: 'How do I solve that problem?'

I believe that the ability to innovate and to be creative are teachable processes. There are ways by which people can systematically innovate or systematically become creative.

I see a problem and I invent some sort of solution to it.

The best creative solutions don't come from finding good answers to the questions that are presented... They come from inventing new questions!

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.

All the problems sitting there are an invitation for you to be creative, make use of your skills and resources and find a solution.

If you are creative enough to imagine a problem, you're clever enough to discover a solution.

The capacity to innovate - the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life - and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge.

I think I was always inspired by seeing a problem, and finding a solution.

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.

I'm a problem-solver.

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.

I was just taught very early that if I didn't solve problems, I was headed for a very dark path. Problems were everywhere. Now, even if there are no problems, I look for problems. I'm like, 'You know what? I don't like the way this spoon works. I want to design a new spoon.'

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems.

The impossible - we are told - cannot be achieved. To overcome the 'impossible,' we need to use our wits and be fearless. We need to break the rules and to circumvent - some would one say to cheat.

Usually, the best ideas come from having to fix a really hard problem.

For every failure, there's an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.

Anytime you put a challenge out there, people come up with a creative solution on the software side.

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

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.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, 'Oh, I forgot that bit,' then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you've figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

I'm really looking at questions of power, navigation, and spin. Then I am also looking for real-world stories that give me greater insight into smart and new ways of thinking.

Sometimes a problem will seem completely insurmountable. Then someone comes up with a simple new idea, or just a rearrangement of old ideas, that completely eliminates it.

It's always good to have a limit because it forces you to think about all the ways to get what you want.