The Reinventors Quotes

“We're not very good when we're spending other people's money.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Innovators "view failure not as a fatal character flaw but as a learning experience.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Today, every business, including yours, is being observed and studied by others who want your revenues.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“The refrain we constantly heard from the entrepreneurs and leaders during our research was to never bet the ranch but to make lots of small bets, learn from them, and then scale.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Today, every business, including yours, is being observed and studied by others who want your revenues. The world operates with such speed that as soon as potential competitors sniff out the fact that another business is doing well and they believe there’s a buck to be made they’ll be all over it like a cheap suit”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Here are nine reasons I’ve seen and heard most often as I search to understand why we hesitate: Why people hesitate to act Gotten too comfortable Study things to death Lack of confidence Think the big deal will fly in the window Think it’s already too late for them Fear of losing what they have Afraid nobody will pitch in Family pressures to not take the risk Lack of financial safety net”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“After twenty years of systematic observation I’ve decided the most common mistake is for one to get stuck on the “plains of hesitation.” The plains of hesitation are a metaphorical place where the best laid plans and good intentions expire.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Until people are able to figure out how to deal with the natural tendency to hesitate and drag their feet because of their fear of the unknown, no meaningful reinvention will occur.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Lancaster takes us back to where we started, but with a brilliant twist. The test of intelligence is indeed the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in one’s mind, appreciate both, and still function. But you don’t have to be the be-all and end-all expert in your business at one side or the other. In fact, you can be the one who doesn’t excel at either. You can be the one who appreciates both and creates the conditions for both sides to flourish.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Mean systems scapegoat and demoralize. They attack people instead of problems. They’re a relic of a primitive and superstitious past. They are not data driven.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“One of my favorite CEOs reminds me often that “memories are convenient.” What he means is we more readily remember events that prove we’re right.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Lantech’s reinvention intervention answers one of the most fundamental questions about embracing change: Whose idea wins? The answer, of course, is that the best idea should win—not the boss’s idea, not the boss’s kid’s idea, not the strategy department’s idea, not the old idea, not the competition’s idea; only the best idea should win.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Lancaster says that the magic around a reinvention intervention is that the people involved in the process have a say but the establishment—the leadership—doesn’t. “I was there as one member of a team wearing jeans and working alongside everyone else,” says Lancaster, “not as a boss, owner, or CEO.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“we’re not going to spend any money making the changes. If something doesn’t work we’ll fix it. We want creativity before capital and quick and crude rather than slow and elegant.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Lancaster hired Anand Sharma, CEO of TBM Consulting Group and a man named by Fortune magazine as one of America’s Heroes of Manufacturing, to assist the company in a dramatic and swift turnaround. They shut down the assembly line one weekend, turned off the IBM material planning system the company had invested millions of dollars in, and said, “We’re never going back to doing things the way we did, and within five days we have to have a new way of doing things.” With Sharma’s guidance the forty team members selected for the reinvention mapped the firm’s current processes, collectively designed new ones, and set a series of objectives.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“there are two honest reasons so many people hate the thought of the functions they perform being systematized: Either they’re too inflexible to learn a new way of doing things, or they’re scared to death of the accountability that systematization will bring.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“what A. G. Lafley, CEO at highly innovative Procter & Gamble, said about innovation. “It is possible to measure the yield of each process, the quality, and the end result.” Lafley quickly brought systematization to the innovation process at P&G, creating the Living It program, putting employees in the homes of customers to systematically observe their challenges and processes; Working It, to connect company decision makers with the front lines of their channel partners; and Connect and Develop, to combat the insular, not-invented-here blinders and realize that lots of innovation happens outside Procter & Gamble’s walls.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“grow double digits each year for decades. To scale any business you must first create a reliable system for all functions—manufacturing, sales, promotion, talent acquisition, innovation, even leadership from the CEO.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Every entrepreneur thinks about how his or her idea will be scaled, or grown big enough and quickly enough to create a real competitive advantage. But scale can’t happen until there are systems”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“We had to figure out a way to come up with big innovations, embrace change, and invent new services and products that would differentiate us from our competition and would let us grow faster than our industry. We were waiting for big ideas instead of using a system to innovate.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Companies that do the best job of embracing constant change, growth, and reinvention make it look easy, because they’ve systematized and scaled all the core business practices. Systematizing means determining the best way to do something (step-by-step), making certain everyone does his or her part the same way (without significant variation), and then using the system as a baseline for continual improvement.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Here’s the list of opposing ideas that successful reinventors say you need in your head: Hold on tight and freely let go. Be hard-nosed and soft hearted.    Focus on a clear destination and search for new horizons. Take big risks and make small bets. Be frugal and still splurge. Think big and act small. Be highly creative and obsessively down-to-earth.    Thoughtfully work your plan and improvise without thinking too much.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Be relentless about simplifying everything without exception.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“A.T. Kearney research shows that the best performing companies had five hundred fewer managers per billion dollars in sales than poorer performing organizations.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Hackett found that leaders at “above average” companies are surprisingly different in this critical measure. They identify an average of just twenty-one priorities instead of 372. Editing the list isn’t easy, but the payoff is huge. Time and money get tightly focused on the crucial activities that drive the firm’s competitive advantage, and everyone has a clearer idea what to do and no problem deciding who’s accountable.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“The more simple you can make it allows your people to get really focused.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“As testament to the passion for change and reinvention that Apple embraces, more than half of the company’s revenue comes from products that didn’t exist four years ago.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“not having enough money brought everyone together at Southwest. Twelve different job functions, from flight crews to baggage handlers, all put aside status concerns, job descriptions, and work rules to become a team with a big objective: the ten-minute turn.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“Frugal Is a “Whack on the Side
of the Head” “We all need a whack on the side of the head on occasion to shake us out of our routine patterns, to force us to rethink our problems, and to stimulate us to ask the questions that lead to the right answers,” explains creativity expert Roger von Oech. The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright echoed that sentiment when he wrote in The Natural House, “The human race built most nobly when the limitations were the greatest… . Limitations seem to have been the best friend of architecture.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“But the billion-dollar cut was anything but self-defeating tinkering. Many of the research scientists were energized. They cleaned out the cobwebs and refocused their thinking, many spending quality time with customers. The result was scores of innovations that matter. Frugal was a catalyst, not a catastrophe.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change