Best 50 quotes of Max Mckeown on MyQuotes

A great strategy meeting is a meeting of minds.

All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.

Becoming a strategic thinker is about opening your mind to possibilities. It’s about seeing the bigger picture. It’s about understanding the various parts of your business, taking them apart, and then putting them back together again in a more powerful way. It’s about insight, invention, emotion and imagination focused on reshaping some part of the world.

Brilliant strategy is the best route to desirable ends with available means.

Change is inevitable, progress is not.

Change is not overcoming inertia as much as it is redirecting, guiding, tweaking what already is and what has already happened. We must believe that we can make choices and that those choices can alter the future.

Corporate strategy is usually only useful if you get people engaged with helping you to make it work.

Doing nothing requires effort. Over time, that effort is greater than the effort necessary to improve, or move somewhere better. The trick is to redirect energy.

Following the rules of your industry will only get you so far.

Give serious thought to why your company should care about your strategy. Specifically, find problems that the board wants to be solved. What are senior managers scared of? Part of becoming a credible strategic thinker is learning effective approaches to selling ideas for your situation. You’ll know that you’re getting better at selling (or pitching) strategy when managers start coming to you when there is strategic thinking to be done.

How much time have you invested in thinking about strategy? How many options have you considered before the plan was written? How have you ensured that the thinking behind the plan is challenged? How much time do you spend exploring trends, possibilities and cool stuff? How much time is spent playing with ideas, hopes and dreams?

Ideally, you will develop strategic response to your place in the corporate lifecycle to identify new paths of strategic renewal. You will look for new growth curves that can be started early enough to replace declining products and you will try to identify whole new curves that will take the organisation to new levels of growth as a whole.

If you change the rules of the market, you can be more successful than your competitors.

Innovation is new stuff that is made useful.

Our need for innovation has shifted power closer to the source of that power-Us. We are the future.

Strategists who don’t take time to think are just planners.

Strategy and culture should have breakfast together.

Strategy is about out-thinking your competition. Mark Zuckerberg, while at Harvard, built a website called Facemash ‘for fun’. Even today, Facebook believe that ‘done is better than perfect’.

Strategy is not a solo sport, even if you're the CEO.

Strategy was first used in Athens (508 BC) to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytic side of strategy.

The real heart of strategy is the strategist.

The task of the strategist and leadership team is to reduce uncertainty in the areas that they can directly influence in order to pursue attractively difficult objectives.

We need to move from comparative advantage to perpetual advantage.

What are you doing at the moment? How does that compare to your competitors? What do you want to achieve?  How can you create something people want?

Whenever a maker and a thinker get together, really cool stuff happens.

With a clever strategy, each action is self-reinforcing. Each action creates more options that are mutually beneficial. Each victory is not just for today but for tomorrow.

Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win.

All we've got is Now. Life, composed of a billion moments, from our first to our last thoughts.

As an innovator, you need to be aware of how traditions, habits and bias can act as barriers to accepting new ideas.

Before innovation - or practical creativity - there is insight. You must see the world differently.

Culture is the sum of the values, beliefs and assumptions of human groups.

Embrace the perpetual joy of moving perpetually forward.

If life is fast, live faster.

If there are no new ideas, there is no innovation. And if there is no creativity, there are no new ideas.

If traditional doesn't work, then traditions won't do.

If you don't start, you're finished.

Innovation can start with wanting what does not yet exist - and finding a solution - or seeing what does not yet exist - and finding an opportunity.

Nowists are more likely to experience joy because they embrace the uncertainty of existence. They are switched on by the uncertain stuff of human life and come alive when faced with life at its most uncontrollable.

Nowists get off on getting on, so they run when they could walk, jump when they could sit and dance when they could sit at the edge. They regret inaction, so simply act.

Only the right pain gets the right gain.

Plug into the anti-obvious power of the rebel. Or get those opposing minds to plug into your purpose, to solve your problem, to reimagine your process.

Problem-insight precedes solution insight. Someone has to recognise a problem before they start to solve the problem...

Pushing your limits is what allows you to grow stronger, so if you find yourself feeling passive, it can make sense to dial it up a little. Get moving. Accomplish something small. Do something you enjoy. Embrace what moves you. And start again.

Strategy is not really a solo sport – even if you’re the CEO.

The best things happen to those who don't wait.

The psychology of individual creativity is about at least three different things. First, creativity is about thinking differently. Second, creativity is about feeling differently. Third, creativity is about focusing, or committing, differently.

There are no perfect leaders.

The true parents of creativity are curiosity and necessity.

You get told to look before you leap. But if you are too careful you may end up just looking.

Your life is what happens when you're busy trying to become unbusy.