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I read a lot of books and articles. As I find useful ideas(to me), I'm recording them here so that I can continually reflect upon them and see what they might be trying to tell me.

See PmGraffiti for other ideas that have popped into my head and that aren't direct quotes. There are also a large number of useful ideas and quotations in GoodToGreatIdeas.

Be so good they can't ignore you.

There's nothing more reassuring than realizing that the world is crazier than you are.

Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.

"The Genius of the And" (versus the "Tyranny of the Or")

Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.

Technology brings value when it diminishes an existing limitation. However, technology is only a necessary but not sufficient condition. In order to obtain the full benefits of a new technology, we must also change the rules and habits we possess that recognized the existence of the limitation.

Ignore the familiar hype: Information is not the foundation of the "New Economy", for information is not an economic offering. As our friend John Perry Barlow likes to say, information wants to be free. Only when companies constitute it in the form of information services--or informational goods and informing experiences--do they create economic value.

Touch-typing is a skill you learn.

Avoid the bozo explosion. ... If you hire one bozo, he'll soon turn around and hire people just like him.

It's very important. But standards are built, not announced.

Our plan is to lead the market with new products, rather than ask them what kind of products they want....Instead of doing a lot of market research, we...refine a product...and try to create a market for it by educating and communicating with the public.

If the Internet was giving the world a shove in a certain direction, it was probably because the world already felt inclined to move in that direction. ... Inadvertently, [the Internet] was telling us what we wanted to become.

...in their efforts to provide better products than their competitors and earn higher prices and margins, suppliers often "overshoot" their market: They give customers more than they need or are ultimately willing to pay for. And more importantly, it means that disruptive technologies that may underperform today, relative to what users in the market demand, may be fully performance competitive in that same market tomorrow.

Linus' Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

When the IDN-WG was initiated, it was obvious to several of the participants that its first important task was an undocumented one: to increase the understanding of the complexities of the problem sufficiently that naive solutions could be rejected and people could go to work on the harder problems. The IDN-WG clearly accomplished that task. The beliefs that the problems were simple, and in the corresponding simplistic approaches and their promises of quick and painless deployment, effectively disappeared as the WG's efforts matured.

Moreover, however effective such technical restrictions are at honoring the author's wishes, they will be exactly that effective in overriding the wishes of her correspondents and would-be forwarders. Technical schemes make this conflict explicit: I want to do this but I can't because someone else says I can't.

Perspective is worth 50 IQ points.

QQ: To make technology productive in a transformation from good to great means asking the following questions. Does the technology fit directly with your Hedgehog Concept? If yes, then you need to become a pioneer in the application of that technology. If no, then ask, do you need this technology at all? If yes, then all you need is parity. [...] If no, then the technology is irrelevant and you can ignore it. QF: Jim Collins, Good to Great (see also GoodToGreatIdeas)

QQ: Las Vegas == A SimCity game gone horribly wrong. QF: Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

Most men would rather die, than think. Many do.

QQ: While a product meets a need, an experience fulfills a desire. QF: Rubin and Gold, Dragon Spirit: How to Self-Market Your Dream (cf. Pine and Gilmore, The Experience Economy)

QQ: In the long now, all distances are small. QF: Scott Duff

Organizations with strong safety cultures generally acknowledge that a leader's best response to unanimous consent is to play devil's advocate and encourage an exhaustive debate.

Streamlining and downsizing, which scarcely go unnoticed by employees, convey a message that efficiency is an important goal.

Engineers and program planners were also affected by "Can-Do", which, when taken too far, can create a reluctance to say that something cannot be done.

Leaders create culture. It is their responsibility to change it. Top administrators must take responsibility for risk, failure, and safety by remaining alert to the effects their decisions have on the system.

Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

Microsoft Windows looks better the more it starts to look like Unix.

Those who study genetics avoid studying humans... Because new generations come along only every thirty years or so, it takes a long time to understand the cause and effect of any changes. Instead, they study fruit flies, because they are conceived, born, mature, and die all within a single day. If you want to understand why something happens in business, study the disk drive industry. Those companies are the closest things to fruit flies that the business world will ever see.

From the beginning of the OEM disk drive industry, product development had proceeded in three sequential steps. First you designed the drive; then you made it; and then you sold it. We changed all that. We first sell the drives; then we design them; and then we build them.

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.