Chin-Ning Chu Quotes

Almost never does a single company have excellence in a multiplicity of disciplines.

I tell public audiences, don't go to a podiatrist for brain surgery; don't go to an astronomer for planetary science.

I'm someone who can provide an intellectual framework, but I can't tell people who are trying to sell Product X how to do that because I don't know, and I would be faking it if I attempted to step into that role.

I'm a football coach. I'm not a doctor ... They don't call plays, I don't do surgeries. We have a great deal here.

I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside of their special subject.

To do things that are as complicated and challenging as spaceflight, you have to have all disciplines represented to get the job done.

I just happen to know how to hit a baseball and throw a baseball. But I probably couldn't go into somebody else's job and be as good as they are but no one's praising them about it.

I think it's healthy that people that work in a creative field look for inspiration in a different creative field.

When you're building a business, you want to focus and deliver excellence at what you do. This simply cannot be done when you are launching multiple ventures, dozens of new products, and selling everywhere and anywhere at the same time.

Google is so big you have no idea what a given person does.

There are all these different areas of specialization. That's it. You have to be a specialist nowadays. There's no other way. I was an artist for a long time, but I was always into being a general practitioner. I did a little of this and a little of that. And nothing got me anywhere. You have to specialize. If you don't specialize, it takes you until you're about fifty years old before anybody notices that you're doing anything at all.

Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. Or the comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.

I just have never seen anyone build anything significant in any field without having a deep and detailed sense of what they are building on.

The study of economic organization commonly proceeds as though market and administrative modes of organization were disjunct. Market organi­zation is the province of economists. Inter­nal organization is the concern of organization theory specialist. And never the twain shall meet.

I would be wary of experts' intuition, except when they deal with something that they have dealt with a lot in the past.

You can't participate in agriculture or redesign of aircraft for making them safer if you know nothing about it. So, whenever a person says 'will I be participating in the new world?' Only in areas that you can participate it. Areas that you have competence in. I'm not talking about self confidence, I'm talking about the ability to solve problems. Electrical, chemical, technical. I don't know of any other kind of problem.

Everybody's got a different circle of competence. The important thing is not how big the circle is. The important thing is staying inside the circle.

As long as you're in the food business, why not make sweets?

Don't try to be a jack of all investments. Stick to the field you know best.

But while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.

Innovation is fostered by information gathered from new connections; from insights gained by journeys into other disciplines or places; from active, collegial networks and fluid, open boundaries. Innovation arises from ongoing circles of exchange, where information is not just accumulated or stored, but created. Knowledge is generated anew from connections that weren't there before.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

Of course there is a lot of fluidity now between art, architecture and fashion - a lot more cross-pollination in the disciplines, but this isn't about competition, it's about collaboration and what these practices and processes can contribute to one another.