Alan Mulally Quotes

The possible has been tried and failed. Now it's time to try the impossible.

The best thing that I got was rehearsing with my father. It was always about the process of figuring things out, and trying something new, and having another take on something and keeping it alive.

As I've conducted my interviews with crowdsourcing entrepreneurs and experts, it's constantly hit me that your ability to do something big and bold is really a function of the size and quality of your crowd.

There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn't how we've approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.

We see Google experimenting in so many places outside of its core search and advertising business, whether that's bringing broadband Internet to the world or funding an entirely separate company to pursue solutions to disease and mortality. Amazon's one of the few other companies that thinks as big as Google does.

The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy.

When I'm working with improv people, I give them the green light to just bring it and try things.

It seems the best approach for any venture is a combo platter - Japan's quality-consciousness paired with America's willingness to experiment and (sometimes) fail.

Making a moonshot is almost more an exercise in creativity than it is in technology.

We're looking for people who are working on things that seem out of reach, uncomfortably difficult.

We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

In medicine, or in science, you go down a path and it turns out to be a dead end, you really made a contribution, because we know we don’t have to go down that path again. In the press, they call it failure. And so people are unwilling to innovate, unwilling to take risks in government …

A pioneering culture, one that actually enjoys and is excited by experimentation, a culture that rewards experimentation even as it embraces the fact that it is going to lead to failure… And a long-term orientation is a key part of that. If everything has to work this quarter, then you’re by definition not going to be doing very much experimentation.

Innovation is a necessity.

For me, Google was the coolest place. It was the coolest place. People there were so smart. And they were all doing these really interesting things. I just felt lucky to be part of it even in a small way.

There are so many ideas that I have in my mind, of projects that I would love to tackle, people I would love to work with, genres I would love to experiment with, and sounds that don't fit any of my previous projects that I need to find a home for.

The three foundations of judgement: Bold Design, Constant Practice, and Frequent Mistakes.

Crazy ideas sometimes work, and the technological society that we have is built on a foundation of those crazy ideas that work.

Follow a trail of bold mistakes and at the end of them you will find a genius.

But there's no substitute for getting smarter faster. And the way you get smarter is to screw around vigorously. Try stuff. See what works. See what fails miserably. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

Screw-ups are the mark of excellence.

Every girl deserves to take part in creating the technology that will change our world and change who runs it.

To make something really great and different and interesting means taking risks and following these ideas in your head.