by Lee Fried, on 07 Jan 2007 02:45 pm
The Journey
Quote Of the Week
I am currently reading The Elegant Solution by Matthew May a book that describes how Toyota has created and maintained it’s culture of continuous improvement. I just finished a chapter where May describes Toyota’s methods for fostering employee creativity and ingenuity. In this chapter the author talks about how great companies avoid having victimism becoming embedded in their cultures and instead promote and reward those that are willing to take risks. I thought this quote from the text was interesting:
“The root meaning of ingenuity means free thinker. In a world run by powerful bosses and inflexible systems, rarely if ever is creative license granted freely. It’s taken. And that takes basic courage. Or at least a soldier’s bravado. It’s the obstacles that make the achievements so impressive. If it was easy, we wouldn’t me talking about it. No challenge, no creativity.”