Steven Sinofsky Quotes

Without form, communication stops... without form, you have everybody burbling on to themselves, whenever and however, things that no one else can understand and - rightly - no one else is interested in.

Meetings get a bad rap, and deservedly so - most are disorganized and distracted. But they can be a critical tool for getting your team on the same page.

Sometimes big problems are best solved with lots of small and creative solutions.

We must break problems down into small, digestible bits. We must define the concepts that we use and explain what components they consist of. We must tackle small problems.

I'm constantly thinking.

Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.

If everybody knows where everything is kept you can avoid wasting time looking for things.

Whether you're a newspaper journalist, a lawyer, a doctor. You have to organize your thoughts.

Organization, not machine. Get that. Organization, not machine.

A system depends on the players you have.

Meetings are usually terrible, but they shouldn't be.

Two heads are definitely better than one and by sourcing ideas from each other, you have a better chance of coming up with a strategy that will allow your business to overcome a setback or challenge.

Note-taking is important to me: a week's worth of reading notes (or "thoughts I had in the shower" notes) is cumulatively more interesting than anything I might be able to come up with on a single given day.

We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.

I believe that if you really have a strong idea, you can say, "What do you think? Let's see how my idea plays off yours."

The binders, the charts, the grids may seem formidable, but the meetings themselves are built around informality, trust, emotion and humor.

Communication works for those who work at it.

I think there's something in collaboration - the fact that you can sit there and bounce ideas off of someone. It definitely matters who the person is, because certain people... The act of collaboration, where you can talk to someone, hang out, get ideas going, there is something in that. That's similar between everyone. But I think every individual collaborator is different, because they have different brains and emotions and ways of working, so it changes. Definitely.

If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.

After the '57 initial meeting - I was up this way working, not as a staff person - there became the need for a much more definite organized office. What you'd had prior to that time were these big meetings in different places, and there was nobody to pull anything together. Everything was left to [Martin Luther] King and the group that was around him.

I'm always talking to people. It's not that complicated. I just find somebody and say, "Do you have any ideas." If they do, we just start thinking things around.

Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

When you're really trying to make serious change, you don't want people to get caught up in emotion because change isn't emotion. Because change isn't emotion. Its real work and organization and strategy - that's just the truth of it. I mean, you pull people in with inspiration, but then you have to roll up your sleeves and you've got to make sacrifices and you have got to have structure.

When something bad happens is when you really learn. It causes self-examination, it causes you to take a look at yourself. You naturally start analyzing. It's not that you're wrong; it's that sometimes you just need to make adjustments. Change your way of thinking, change your way of doing, change your way of choosing.

My hope is that design thinking becomes an innovative discipline and not just the trend of the decade. As a nation and globally, we have some of the biggest problems to solve we have ever faced. We need innovative ways to solve our problems and communicating the solutions will be paramount. Original thinking, complex problem solving, and collaboration are all important skills for our future.