Kilby displayed his awshucks humility. When I hear that kind of thing, he responded, it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: 'No, I didn't build it...

their ability to work as teams made them even more creative. The tale of their teamwork is important because we don't often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.

most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively.

His embrace, however, did not extend to people who were pretentious or pompous {with the exception of Wiener}. When he thought a speaker was spouting nonsense, he would stand up and ask what seemed to...

atomic power, radar, and the Internet-were spawned by the military.

The most successful endeavors in the digital age were those run by leaders who fostered collaboration while also providing a clear vision. Too often these are seen as conflicting traits: a leader is...

First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses. This

Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire.

Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31

When he went to PARC for his formal interview, Kay was asked what he hoped his great achievement there would be. A personal computer, he answered. Asked what that was, he picked up a notebook-size...

Using Hollerith's tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight. It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information, and the company that Hollerith...

the biggest way to deliver an effect to the world is not by writing a paper but by taking technology you believe in and making something of it.

Taylor recalled that he ran into a brick wall every time he tried to deal with the suits back east. As the head of a Xerox research facility in Webster, New York, explained to him, "The computer will...

people who expect deference because they have a PhD and don't want to deal with ordinary people tend to be annoying.

By 1972 the price of a pocket calculator had dropped to $100, and 5 million units were sold. By 1975 the price was down to $25, and sales were doubling every year. In 2014 a Texas Instruments pocket...

The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings.

I can't see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own, DEC president Ken Olsen declared at a May 1974 meeting where his operations committee was debating whether to create a smaller...

As Licklider explained, the sensible goal was to create an environment in which humans and machines cooperate in making decisions. In other words, they would augment each other. Men will set the...

Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.' That is a really good phrase.

To succeed at any ambitious project, you had to assess all of the intricate ramifications of an action, weigh probabilities, share information, organize people, and more.

When it came time to renegotiate the price, Hoff made a critical recommendation to Noyce, one that helped create a huge market for general-purpose chips and assured that Intel would remain a driver of...

Such a leader knows how to empower groups to self-organize. When it's done right, a governance structure by consensus naturally emerges, as happened both with Linux and Wikipedia. What astonishes so...

A physicist is one who's concerned with the truth, he later said. An engineer is one who's concerned with getting the job done.65

During his Oxford years, microprocessors became available. So, just as Wozniak and Jobs had done, he and his friends designed boards that they tried to sell. They were not as successful as the Steves,...

During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC's creed: The best way to predict the...

conception is just the first step. What really matters is execution.

New ideas occur when a lot of random notions churn together until they coalesce.

key challenge for managers is how to strike a balance between being decisive and being collegial

The digital age could not become truly transformational until computers became truly personal.

When people take insights from multiple sources and put them together, it's natural for them to think that the resulting ideas are their own-as