Business Education
Creativity, Inc
Personal Highlights:
  • viewers sense not just movement but intention—or, put another way, emotion—then the animator has done his or her job.
  • One of my classmates, Jim Clark, would go on to found Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Another, John Warnock, would co-found Adobe, known for Photoshop and...
  • My invention of something called the “Z-buffer” was a good example of this, in that it built on others’ work. The Z-buffer was designed to...
Zero to One
Personal Highlights:
  • If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
  • Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
  • Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble. But the distortions...
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Personal Highlights:
  • productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every...
  • To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.
  • did we sell any more products (i.e., did our throughput go up?); did we lay off anybody (did our operational expense go down?); and the...
Getting to Yes
Personal Highlights:
  • The method of principled negotiation is hard on the merits, soft on the people.
  • the more attention that is paid to positions, the less attention is devoted to meeting the underlying concerns of the parties.
  • Apart from the substantive merits, the feeling of participation in the process is perhaps the single most important factor in determining whether a negotiator accepts...
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Personal Highlights:
  • People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate...
  • The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful....
  • You must consider first all of the other employees and second your friend. The good of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole.