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121 " At Apple—just like Google—the leaders are product people with technical backgrounds. "
― Eric Schmidt , How Google Works
122 " The result of all this turmoil is that product excellence is now paramount to business success—not control of information, not a stranglehold on distribution, not overwhelming marketing power (although these are still important). "
123 " Product development has become a faster, more flexible process, where radically better products don’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed. "
124 " There are tipping points in knave density. It approaches a critical mass—which is smaller than you think45—and people start to believe they need to be knave-like to succeed, which only exacerbates the problem. "
125 " Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. "
126 " And about that drunken Carnival photo: Unless they demonstrate a serious character flaw, we generally don’t hold a candidate’s online photos and commentary against her. We are hiring for passion, remember, and passionate people will often have an exuberant online presence. This demonstrates a love of the digital medium, an important characteristic in today’s world. "
127 " Over time I’ve learned, surprisingly, that it’s tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven’t been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible. "
128 " The urgency of the role isn’t sufficiently important to compromise quality in hiring. In the inevitable showdown between speed and quality, quality must prevail. "
129 " In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”19 The second reason product excellence is so critical is that the cost of experimentation and failure has dropped significantly. "
130 " it’s not a key component of your job to ensure that employees consistently have a forty-hour workweek. "
131 " Humans are by nature territorial, and the corporate world reflects this. In most companies the size of your office, the quality of your furniture, and the view from your window connote accomplishment and respect. Conversely, nothing reduces smart people to whiny complainers as quickly as a new office floor plan. It’s not uncommon for interior design to become a passive-aggressive means of literally keeping people “in their place. "
132 " In this traditional command-and-control structure, data flows up to the executives from all over the organization, and decisions subsequently flow down. This approach is designed to slow things down, and it accomplishes the task very well. Meaning that at the very moment when businesses must permanently accelerate, their architecture is working against them. "
133 " If your customers are asking for it, you aren’t being innovative when you give them what they want; you are just being responsive. "
134 " If you can’t tell someone how to think, then you have to learn to manage the environment where they think. "
135 " if you detect a knave in your midst it’s best to reduce his responsibility and appoint a knight to assume it. "
136 " In the 1900s, the gasoline engine led to innovations in automobiles, motorcycles, and airplanes. By the 1950s, it was the integrated circuit proliferating in numerous applications. "
137 " offer management tracks for people with the greatest potential, whereby these stars rotate in and out of different roles every two years or so. But this approach emphasizes the development of management skills, not technical ones. As a result, most knowledge workers in traditional environments develop deep technical expertise but little breadth, or broad management expertise but no technical depth. "
138 " experience is valuable only if it is used to frame a winning argument. "
139 " Hiring decisions are too important to be left in the hands of a manager who may or may not have a stake in the employee’s success a year later. "
140 " Climb, confess and comply. Pilots learn that when they get in trouble the first step is to climb: get yourself out of danger. Then, confess: talk to the tower and explain that you screwed up and how. Finally, comply: when traffic controllers tell you how to do it better next time, do it. "