Max McKeown Quotes

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’.
Max McKeown
Brilliant strategy is the best route to desirable ends with available means.
Max McKeown
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.
Max McKeown
Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win.
Max McKeown
A great strategy meeting is a meeting of minds.
Max McKeown
Strategy is not really a solo sport – even if you’re the CEO.
Max McKeown
Following the rules of your industry will only get you so far.
Max McKeown
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.
Max McKeown
The real heart of strategy is the strategist.
Max McKeown
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.
Max McKeown
There are no perfect leaders.
Max McKeown
Change is inevitable, progress is not.
Max McKeown
All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.
Max McKeown
Corporate strategy is usually only useful if you get people engaged with helping you to make it work.
Max McKeown
Strategy and culture should have breakfast together.
Max McKeown
The smart strategist allows strategy to be shaped by events. Good reactions can make great strategy. Strategy involves competition of goals, and the risk is the difference between those goals and the ability of the organization to achieve them. So part of the risk is created by the strategy.
Max McKeown
Strategy is about shaping the future.
Max McKeown
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.
Max McKeown
We need to move from comparative advantage to perpetual advantage...
Max McKeown
Problem-insight precedes solution insight. Someone has to recognise a problem before they start to solve the problem...
Max McKeown
If there are no new ideas, there is no innovation. And if there is no creativity, there are no new ideas.
Max McKeown
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.
Max McKeown
The true parents of creativity are curiosity and necessity.
Max McKeown
If traditional doesn't work, then traditions won't do.
Max McKeown
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.
Max McKeown
Before innovation - or practical creativity - there is insight. You must see the world differently.
Max McKeown
Innovation is about practical creativity - it's about making new ideas useful...
Max McKeown
As an innovator, you need to be aware of how traditions, habits and bias can act as barriers to accepting new ideas.
Max McKeown
Culture is the sum of the values, beliefs and assumptions of human groups.
Max McKeown
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.
Max McKeown
Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.
Max McKeown
All we've got is Now. Life, composed of a billion moments, from our first to our last thoughts.
Max McKeown
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.
Max McKeown
Your life is what happens when you're busy trying to become unbusy.
Max McKeown
Embrace the perpetual joy of moving perpetually forward.
Max McKeown
You get told to look before you leap. But if you are too careful you may end up just looking.
Max McKeown
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.
Max McKeown
Only the right pain gets the right gain.
Max McKeown
The best things happen to those who don't wait.
Max McKeown
If life is fast, live faster.
Max McKeown
If you don't start, you're finished.
Max McKeown
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.
Max McKeown