Max McKeown Quotes

There are immense numbers of potential entrepreneurs who can start their own businesses among the people who are working in large organisations.

Pushing your limits is what allows you to grow stronger, so if you find yourself feeling passive, it can make sense to dial it up a little. Get moving. Accomplish something small. Do something you enjoy. Embrace what moves you. And start again.

Ideally, you will develop strategic response to your place in the corporate lifecycle to identify new paths of strategic renewal. You will look for new growth curves that can be started early enough to replace declining products and you will try to identify whole new curves that will take the organisation to new levels of growth as a whole.

All we've got is Now. Life, composed of a billion moments, from our first to our last thoughts.

All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.

Following the rules of your industry will only get you so far.

We need to move from comparative advantage to perpetual advantage ...

Brilliant strategy is the best route to desirable ends with available means.

The task of the strategist and leadership team is to reduce uncertainty in the areas that they can directly influence in order to pursue attractively difficult objectives.

The true parents of creativity are curiosity and necessity.

The best things happen to those who don't wait.

Only the right pain gets the right gain.

If you don't start, you're finished.

Your life is what happens when you're busy trying to become unbusy.

Give serious thought to why your company should care about your strategy. Specifically, find problems that the board wants to be solved. What are senior managers scared of? Part of becoming a credible strategic thinker is learning effective approaches to selling ideas for your situation. You'll know that you're getting better at selling (or pitching) strategy when managers start coming to you when there is strategic thinking to be done.

Doing nothing requires effort. Over time, that effort is greater than the effort necessary to improve, or move somewhere better. The trick is to redirect energy.

Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.

Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win.

If you change the rules of the market, you can be more successful than your competitors.

Innovation can start with wanting what does not yet exist - and finding a solution - or seeing what does not yet exist - and finding an opportunity.

Let go to get going.

The psychology of individual creativity is about at least three different things. First, creativity is about thinking differently. Second, creativity is about feeling differently. Third, creativity is about focusing, or committing, differently.

Nowists get off on getting on, so they run when they could walk, jump when they could sit and dance when they could sit at the edge. They regret inaction, so simply act.

If there are no new ideas, there is no innovation. And if there is no creativity, there are no new ideas.

A great strategy meeting is a meeting of minds.

Corporate strategy is usually only useful if you get people engaged with helping you to make it work.

Strategy was first used in Athens (508 BC) to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytic side of strategy.

Innovation is new stuff that is made useful.

With a clever strategy, each action is self-reinforcing. Each action creates more options that are mutually beneficial. Each victory is not just for today but for tomorrow.

Becoming a strategic thinker is about opening your mind to possibilities. It's about seeing the bigger picture. It's about understanding the various parts of your business, taking them apart, and then putting them back together again in a more powerful way. It's about insight, invention, emotion and imagination focused on reshaping some part of the world.

Dont be a life spectator.. take the plunge.

Change is inevitable, progress is not.

Strategy and culture should have breakfast together.

The founder of Dell found ways of delivering Hewlett Packard's most profitable products for much lower prices but forgot to deliver their quality so within a few years had fallen behind again. Ideas need constant renewal. A great idea will never be perfect and will never work perfectly in all markets and all seasons.

You have to learn to see the gold in dirt, which means that you try to spot people with potential as well as ideas that have potential.

The smart strategist allows strategy to be shaped by events. Good reactions can make great strategy. Strategy involves competition of goals, and the risk is the difference between those goals and the ability of the organization to achieve them. So part of the risk is created by the strategy.

Entrepreneurs don't believe the future is predictable - but they do believe that they can create the future themselves.

Strategy is about shaping the future.

Before innovation - or practical creativity - there is insight. You must see the world differently.

Innovation is about practical creativity - it's about making new ideas useful ...

Strategy is not really a solo sport – even if you're the CEO.

There are no perfect leaders.

The real heart of strategy is the strategist.