Elon Musk Quotes

The Pentagon isn't a place that champions individuality and innovation.

A lot of what is wrong with corporate America has to do with a culture filled with antibodies trained to expel anything different. HR departments often want cookie cutter employees, which inevitably results in cookie cutter solutions.

If we all dress alike, we might as well all work in cubicles.

We have the finest officers in the world, but it seems like once they become generals it is a self-licking ice cream cone of who gets promoted and who gets approved to join that club. No one thinks outside the box.

Japanese businesspeople and companies are lacking in individuality.

Much public thinking follows a rut. The same thing is true in science. People get stuck and don't look in other directions.

In very big companies, you find less entrepreneurialism than you really want to see. Success is defined as 'don't make a mistake.' And you get to be the C.E.O. by outlasting everybody else, then you're there for five or six years, and you want to get your bonus on the way out.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

I think in reality, today, if you use the same tools as everyone else, you kind of build the same products.

All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past - by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.

Where you have 20 people who all share roughly the same educational and life experiences, they're going to come up with the same solutions to the same problems.

The most important rule of bureaucracy is never be wrong and alone.

The business world worships mediocrity. Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it.

I realize that we all do express ourselves, but those who express that which is always being done are those whose thinking is almost in every way in accord with everyone else. Expression on this basis has become dull to those who wish to think for themselves.

I was not very keen on joining the family business... there were 14 family members working together, and it worried me that I would not have enough individuality.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

I do everything that everybody else does.

... one of the things that will distinguish businesses into this next decade is ... how they use information.... I think it'll change culture, it'll change everything that you do. And I believe it'll differentiate the winners and the losers.

Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future.

Industry leaders have the power to set standards.

Government and business are simple. It's only people that make them complicated.

Where all think alike, none thinks very much.

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

Process is your friend, but process also dictates what you can do.