Warren Bennis Quotes

The characteristic of great innovators and great companies is they see a space that others do not. They don't just listen to what people tell them; they actually invent something new, something that you didn't know you needed, but the moment you see it, you say, 'I must have it.'

Historic opportunities are missed because we fixate on what folks say they want. And what folks say they want in business and politics is limited to what they believe is possible.

I feel like I've been able to bring an idea to the world stage and shine a light on a different way to play, an easier way. I want to change the game.

I just want to change the game.

One of the things about Steve Jobs is that he gives us an opportunity to look at the disjuncture between that world and the world he claimed that Apple represented, the "Think different" world of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Gandhi.

For new ideas to be translated into new realities requires not only clarity of vision but also the opportunity to change old realities.

We truly could have used the later Jobs in earlier years at Apple, is what I feel.

I believe that in any initiative, you can't have a flavor of the month. When you believe something is profound in a company, you can not be a logical leader. You have to go to the lunatic fringe. There is no way that logic is what you need to change people.

The bottom line is that I have a job to do to help get the new administration ready. If there's some role for me that I want to do and the president-elect wants me to do - we've known each other 14 years. We'll talk about it.

Jobs was brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.

True genius can be identified by the fact that its expression changes the world into something it has never been before.

But I tell people all the time that if you can do the job, then there's a spot for you. I refuse to believe that there isn't any room in this business. People leave jobs and jobs open up every year. If you can do the job, you'll find your way into the broadcast booth.

Keep showing up for your side of the job and give genius a chance to do its part.

Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.

For, after all, in science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.

As I have said for two years now, when Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, it was wrong to outsource the job of capturing them to Afghan warlords who a week earlier were fighting against us.

Thinking is always dangerous to the status quo. [...] The moment you start thinking, you'll want to change something.

The online shopping paradigm is finally changing. Indeed, I think we’ve seen more innovation in the last 10 months than in the last 10 years. We’ve seen an explosion of interesting technologies and opportunities that seek to change online shopping.

The reason I got a break in Hollywood when I moved here a few years ago is my good buddy, who I was on the beach with when he was a publicist, is now the chairman of HBO.

We're just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There's a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we'll look back and say, 'Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'

Everybody who works in the computer industry is in an industry that didn't exist twenty-five years ago. We are talking on cell phones, and there were no such things. All the people who work for Nextel and so on, those are lost jobs that became found jobs. We are in a constant state of changing, and there are numerous opportunities in a time like this, but people are still going back to the fear.

Almost every significant breakthrough is the result of a courageous break with traditional ways of thinking.

At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days. We attract a different type of person—a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe. We are aware that we are doing something significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes. Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

Not that that's my goal, but when you're very wealthy and very famous, you can have a lot more decisions in what you do. You have a lot more opportunity. You can maybe even not work for a few years. It puts you in a great position to make some decisions. You're not always taking every job that comes and that kind of thing.

We've been working for years on how we can use technology to help people make their own jobs, become entrepreneurs, create their own small businesses. Those are the kinds of things that I and a bunch of other people at LinkedIn actually work on.