The Right Kind of Crazy Quotes

“A more cohesive team would have sensed the disconnect. The lesson I learned from this mistake was that you not only have to find something to love about each of your people; you have to extend that love far and wide to all the other divisions and departments that you depend on.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“To shift our team’s culture, I continued to push hard with the questions, driving insight at a pace that established my leadership and encouraged the team members to question and dig deeper.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“OODA loop.” The acronym, from military strategy, stands for “observe, orient, decide, act.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“Many years later, Tim has a very successful career.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“We all share the instinct, and we can all relate to it, which gives our curiosity-driven need to explore the added beauty that no one has to be forced to do it. People don’t necessarily have to be incentivized with stock options and mega-salaries for curiosity-driven creativity to occur. The only essential ingredient is a work environment that’s structured to encourage our innate drive to wonder, question, and explore.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“In curiosity-based decision making, we use one of the core traits of our species to pull apart, examine, and wade into the open question. In my experience curiosity-based decision making yields much better solutions.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“The converse lesson is that anyone who waits around to be authorized to speak up is never going to be a leader. It’s just not in their nature.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“They were developing their basic intuition, a necessary if time-consuming process. They’d design something, then test it, then design and test something else, relying on a sort of a guess-and-check algorithm.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“The key to searching for the truth is to hold passionately to your beliefs while simultaneously not feeling entrenched in your position, to be able to let go of the need to defend it in order to save face.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“At JPL we use a matrix organization structure—”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“You never ask a question you don’t know the answer to, and the battle is won or lost over which piece of evidence the jury is allowed to see.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“OODA loop.” The acronym, from military strategy, stands for “observe, orient, decide, act.” It comes into play whenever there are recurring cycles of action and information in a competitive landscape. Whoever can react more quickly (and wisely)—“get inside the other’s OODA loop”—will most likely win.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“In our designs we look for the simplest, lowest-risk way of solving a problem.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“The obvious goal is to create the most productive team in order to deliver the best team product.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“in my experience organizing humans together for a common goal is much more of an art—creative, fuzzy, and emotive.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“going to bring my whole self to the task at hand, and the biggest part of that task was going to be leadership. We humans are an extremely social”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“baked and wrong? Breaking the matter down, understanding your state of understanding, and keeping your mind free and purely focused on the matter at hand—not yourself—is the only way to strike the right balance between consideration and action.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“Breaking the matter down, understanding your state of understanding, and keeping your mind free and purely focused on the matter at hand—not yourself—”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“which means that you stop trying to force the existing solution. That’s when a”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“my greatest strengths, when concentrated too heavily, become my greatest weaknesses. Using your full self can be a great thing, but not when it crowds out other people.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“settle for self-delusion these days, it’s usually because we’ve stopped short in our truth seeking and have accepted a subset of the universe in our model as being the whole universe. In engineering we might omit a term in an equation because we don’t think it is important”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“was the integration of the subconscious and conscious minds.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“The final set, and perhaps the most important, is the unknown unknowns, the things you don’t even know that you don’t know.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“The bin of unknown knowns, which Rumsfeld has used to refer to things you think you know but you do not. This”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“The hard facts are what he called the known knowns.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“And if you demonstrate that you’re willing to be wrong in pursuit of finding right—and freely admit it when you are wrong—everyone else relaxes and feels free to put themselves out there in that same search.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“The goal was to find a way for ideas to win rather than people,”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“examine, and wade into the open question. In my experience curiosity-based decision making yields much better solutions.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“In fact, it is our curiosity that we need to engage and our fear that we need to hold at bay, or release, if we’re going to find what we’re looking for.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation

“Hold on to the doubt” on those cheat sheets back at College of Marin, I was encouraging myself to breathe and let go of the fear so that I could sit beside the open question and really understand it.”
― Adam Steltzner, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation