martinjordan’s most recent Quotables

I never read, I just look at pictures.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Service design is about imagining and developing multi-channel experiences that have a positive social, environmental or commercial return.

You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.

You can’t follow the customer. You’ve got to lead your customers—anticipate their needs and meet those needs, even before they know what they want.

What you say that is negative is an invitation to receive just that.

Success is not a place at which one arrives but rather the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey

It’s not about consistency, it’s about creating stories that make sense.

I never had to ask customers what they wanted. If it’s something truly revolutionary, they won’t be able to help you.

Great companies must have a noble cause. Then it’s the leader’s job to transform that noble cause into such an inspiring vision that it will attract the most talented people in the world to want to join it.

It’s your heart running around outside your body.

We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.