kindle quotes

  • There are three points of executive leverage in strategy making. The first is to manage the cost structure, or values of the organization, so that orders of disruptive products from ideal customers can be prioritized. The second is discovery-driven planning — a disciplined process that accelerates learning what will and won’t work. The third is to vigilantly ensure that deliberate and emergent strategy processes are being followed in the appropriate circumstances for each business in the corporation.

    This is a challenge that few executives have mastered, and is one of the most important contributors to innovative failure in established companies.

    — The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth by Clayton M. Christensen

  • Well-managed companies are excellent at developing the sustaining technologies that improve the performance of their products in the ways that matter to their customers. This is because their management practices are biased toward:

    • Listening to customers.
    • Investing aggressively in technologies that give those customers what they say they want.
    • Seeking higher margins.
    • Targeting larger markets rather than smaller ones.

    — The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) by Clayton M. Christensen

  • Before we truly master something novel (which means, before we can effectively limit its indeterminate significance to something predictable, even irrelevant) we imagine what it might be. Our imaginative representations actually constitute our initial adaptations. Our fantasies comprise part of the structure that we use to inhibit our responses to the apriori significance of the unknown (even as such fantasies facilitate generation of more detailed and concrete information).

    There is no reason to presuppose that we have been able to explicitly comprehend this capacity, in part because it actually seems to serve as a necessary or axiomatic precondition for the ability to comprehend, explicitly.

    — Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson

  • According to Kurzweil, “the Singularity is near,” it’s inevitable, and all we have to do is prepare ourselves to accept it.

    But no matter how many trends can be traced, the future won’t happen on its own. What the Singularity would look like matters less than the stark choice we face today between the two most likely scenarios: nothing or something. It’s up to us. We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today.

    Whether we achieve the Singularity on a cosmic scale is perhaps less important than whether we seize the unique opportunities we have to do new things in our own working lives. Everything important to us — the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment — is singular. Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better — to go from 0 to 1.

    The essential first step is to think for yourself. Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.

    — Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

  • Fundamentally, there is no reason why pleasure, excitement, profound well-being and simple joy at being alive could not become the natural, default state of mind for all who desire it. – Nick Bostrom

    Though it is so often accompanied by descriptions of futuristic gadgets, body augmentation, and distant concerns, the Transhumanist vision provides a reminder that humanity can be far greater than it is today. The human condition is a work in progress. An early and very rough draft of what could be a masterpiece. And the evolution of society begins with the evolution of the individual mind.

    This evolution cannot be left to chance. It must be the result of deliberate design conducted by each person and directed toward the highest values within them. The software framework and the principles of psychitecture are basic psychotechnologies which, if provided and instilled in each individual, could radically advance our evolution.

    — Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Ryan A. Bush

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