Shantanu Kumar > Shantanu's Quotes

“many human skills are tacit because “the aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them.” For example, swimmers are probably not aware of the rules they employ to keep afloat (e.g., in exhaling, they do not completely empty their lungs), nor are medical experts generally aware of the rules they follow in order to reach a diagnosis of a disease. “Indeed,” Polanyi says, “even in modern industries the indefinable knowledge is still an essential part of technology.”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Focus can be difficult, especially for entrepreneurs. People keep options open even when it is not in their best interest, according to former MIT professor Dan Ariely, who discusses the topic in his 2008 book, Predictably Irrational. According to his research, when people are given what appear to be multiple paths to success, they will try to retain all the paths as options, even though selecting one specific path would have guaranteed them the most success.”
― Bill Aulet, Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup

“Google’s search product is an excellent example of an innovative business model. Prior to Google, the business model or “value capture framework” of search engines was to fit as many banner advertisements on a page as possible, and to charge as much as possible for them. Google, by contrast, used simple text ads and targeted them based on the keywords used in a particular search. Advertisers found this technique more attractive than banner ads, because they had better data on the effectiveness of individual ads, and could make more effective ads based on the data. This highly innovative business model is what made Google the juggernaut it is today, not the technical proficiency of its search algorithm.”
― Bill Aulet, Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup

“Stephen Covey, in his book The 8th Habit, describes a poll of 23,000 employees drawn from a number of companies and industries. He reports the poll’s findings: Only 37 percent said they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why. Only one in five was enthusiastic about their team’s and their organization’s goals. Only one in five said they had a clear “line of sight” between their tasks and their team’s and organization’s goals. Only 15 percent felt that their organization fully enables them to execute key goals. Only 20 percent fully trusted the organization they work for.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“When changing times demand a really big shift in strategy, this inside view turns out to be even more of a problem. It’s an inside view of the wrong world, and you are caught blindsided. Rather than an ever-more-precise inside view, strategy needs an “outside view,” where data about the thousands of other experiences by other executives and their companies in other strategy rooms are brought into your own strategy room to shape the discussion. Why benchmark just your operational KPIs when you could have an equally compelling, objective reference point for your strategy? Why not calibrate how good your strategy really is against a broad set of comparative data?”
― Chris Bradley, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds

“Presenters in strategy meetings often seem to not seek a conversation at all. Instead, they appear to deflect as many questions as they can, saying they are “trying to get through the materials.” They want to move to the last page of the presentation as smoothly as possible and then get that all-important “yes” to the plan, that “yes” to the resource request, that “yes” to have a shot at the next promotion. A successful meeting is deemed to be one with little friction and maximum good feelings.”
― Chris Bradley, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds

“It turns out that the more we know, the more dangerous we are. The inside view reigns. We convince ourselves that we have a winning plan this year even though we continue doing pretty much what we’ve always done.”
― Chris Bradley, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds

“Perhaps the most widely read piece of research that McKinsey has published in the past decade showed that companies that rapidly re-allocate capital to new growth businesses outperform those that take a steady-state approach.21 Yet, the social side of strategy is such that companies still tend to take what is known as a “peanut butter” approach—spreading a thin layer of resources smoothly across the whole enterprise, even though it’s clear that opportunities are far greater in some areas than in others.”
― Chris Bradley, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds

“For most businesses, the best predictor of next year’s budget is still this year’s budget, plus or minus a few percent, of course.”
― Chris Bradley, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds

“a dollar’s worth of physical capital in India would produce 58 times the returns available in the United States. Global financial markets, he argued, could not be so blind as to ignore these enormous differences in returns, even taking into account the greater risk of investing in India.”
― Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten The World Economy

“the willingness to be ruthless helps innovation.”
― Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten The World Economy

“Past experience and relationships are of little value in driving radical innovation: indeed, because the natural human tendency is to do more of the same and to serve existing clients and needs well, past relationships can be positively detrimental.”
― Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten The World Economy

“If you are going to eat shit, don’t nibble.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“bringing in the right kind of experience at the right time can mean the difference between bankruptcy and glory.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior. As we learned in The Godfather, ask a Hollywood mogul to give someone a job and he might not respond. Put a horse’s head in his bed and unemployment will drop by one. Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“In well-run organizations, people can focus on their work (as opposed to politics and bureaucratic procedures) and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen both for the company and for them personally. By contrast, in a poorly run organization, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries and broken processes.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“Whenever you can, swap “Let’s think about it” for “Let’s decide on it.” Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward.”
― Jason Fried, ReWork

“It doesn’t matter how much you plan, you’ll still get some stuff wrong anyway. Don’t make things worse by overanalyzing and delaying before you even get going. Long projects zap morale. The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch. Make the call, make progress, and get something out now—while you’ve got the motivation and momentum to do so.”
― Jason Fried, ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever

“Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365.”
― Jason Fried, Rework

“power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others’ perspective.”
― Daniel H. Pink, To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Persuading, Convincing, and Influencing Others

“flexible optimism—optimism with its eyes open.”20”
― Daniel H. Pink, To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Persuading, Convincing, and Influencing Others

“The ultimate goal of a habit-forming product is to solve the user’s pain by creating an association so that the user identifies the company’s product or service as the source of relief.”
― Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

“Fogg posits that there are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors: (1) the user must have sufficient motivation; (2) the user must have the ability to complete the desired action; and (3) a trigger must be present to activate the behavior.”
― Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

“what draws us to act is not the sensation we receive from the reward itself, but the need to alleviate the craving for that reward.”
― Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

“views on these issues are all too often based entirely on the affirmation of specific personal values (“I am for immigration because I am a generous person,” “I am against immigration because migrants threaten our identity as a nation”). And when they are bolstered by anything, it is by made-up numbers and very simplistic readings of the facts. Nobody really thinks very hard about the issues themselves. This is really quite disastrous,”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“This logic says that the wage the firm must pay to get workers to work typically has to be high enough that being fired actually hurts. This is what economists call the efficiency wage. As a result, the wage difference between what firms pay their established workers and what they would need to pay a newcomer may not be very large, because they cannot risk the consequences of paying a newcomer too little.”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“Most people do not like risk, and those close to subsistence level especially so, since any loss could push them into starvation. Is that why so many people prefer not to try?”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

“The real migration crisis is not that there is too much international migration. Most of the time, migration comes at no economic cost to the native population, and it delivers some clear benefits to the migrants. The real problem is that people are often unable or unwilling to move, within and outside their country of birth, to take advantage of economic opportunities”
― Abhijit V. Banerjee, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems