Kate O'Neill > Quotes

“Love doesn’t die with death. Love is like liquid; when it pours out, it seeps into others’ lives. Love changes form and shape. Love gets into everything. Death doesn’t conquer all; love does. Love wins every single time. Love wins by lasting through death. Love wins by loving more, loving again, loving without fear.”
― Kate O'Neill

“We also need to be reminded that there are implications of meaning within data, both in terms of how we look at data meaningfully (as in how it informs our decisions and interactions) and how we see meaning in data (as in how we recognize patterns that tell us if people value what we’re doing).”
― Kate O'Neill, Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces

“We need to reimagine business around new ideas of value, and to understand what value means when it’s about an integrated you in an integrated world.”
― Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

“The key to human-centric digital transformation is knowing your business purpose so you can fulfill it more meaningfully at scale.”
― Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

“A humanistic philosophy starts with the simple agreement that humanity is important. That’s it. It’s not a political agenda, economic plan, or religious affiliation; it’s just the idea that somehow human life is valuable and worth respecting.”
― Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

“When strategy, culture, and brand harmonize, they amplify one another and resonate loud and clear.”
― Kate O'Neill, Lessons from Los Gatos: How Working at a Startup Called Netflix Made Me a Better Entrepreneur

“Relevance is a form of respect.”
― Kate O'Neill

“The biggest problem with the future, though, is that it feels like something we can deal with tomorrow, not today.”
― Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

“Would you still fear the future if you knew you’d done all you could to create the best future possible?”
― Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

“The Tech Humanist mindset is about aligning your business goals with broader human goals so that the more you succeed, the more you bring humanity with you.”
― Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

“Embrace iteration as the road to improvement, but don't let that lull you into rolling out poorly-thought-out crap.”
― Kate O'Neill, Lessons from Los Gatos: How Working at a Startup Called Netflix Made Me a Better Entrepreneur

“Aim to be on the right side of history. Years in the future, when people look back on the defining moments of our present era, make sure your leadership counted for something.”
― Kate O'Neill, A Future So Bright: How Strategic Optimism and Meaningful Innovation Can Restore Our Humanity and Save the World

“When you accept optimism as a default, you can assess your circumstances quite candidly and work toward the best outcome. Pessimism, after all, is no more than acceptance of the worst. Optimism means you have to work for the best.”
― Kate O'Neill, A Future So Bright: How Strategic Optimism and Meaningful Innovation Can Restore Our Humanity and Save the World

“The Tech Humanist proposal is to ensure that business objectives and human objectives are as aligned as possible so that as automated experiences scale, they scale human values with them, and a sense of what is meaningful to humans surrounds us.”
― Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

“The best way to deal with the changes brought about by emerging tech is to make human experience more meaningful.”
― Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

“Strategic Optimism is not about ignoring the limitations, risks, or harms that do exist; in fact, it’s about acknowledging the full reality of the current situation and the full range of possible outcomes, mitigating the worst outcomes, and working diligently toward achieving the best.”
― Kate O'Neill, A Future So Bright: How Strategic Optimism and Meaningful Innovation Can Restore Our Humanity and Save the World

“The meaningful design of experiences in physical space now regularly overlaps with the meaningful design of experiences in digital space.”
― Kate O'Neill, Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces

“There are fundamental ways that meaning informs our lives and work, if we are conscious of it and recognize its shape. The shape meaning takes in marketing is empathy: All relevant customer understanding and communications flow from being aware of and aligned with the customer’s needs and motivations. In business in a broader sense, the shape meaning takes is strategy. It guides every decision and action. In technology and data science, meaning can drive the pursuit of applied knowledge toward that which improves our experiences and our lives. Creative work becomes more meaningful the more it conveys truth. And in our lives overall, an understanding of what is meaningful to us provides us with purpose, clarity, and intention.”
― Kate O'Neill, Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces

“The best results come about when we not only visualize the best possible future but also make a plan to commit ourselves to achieving it.”
― Kate O'Neill, A Future So Bright: How Strategic Optimism and Meaningful Innovation Can Restore Our Humanity and Save the World

“Analytics are people. And relevance, in terms of offering targeted messages and experiences, is a form of showing respect for your customer’s time and interests. So is discretion regarding their privacy.”
― Kate O'Neill, Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces

“I’m not here to say that analytics are bad. I’m here to say that analytics are human. Or at least, they represent the real needs and genuine interests of actual human beings; they’re proxies for people. And as such, we are honor bound to be respectful with them, to consider them with nuance and care, to let them guide us toward creating experiences of delight or at least outcomes that fulfill mutual needs, not to use them, manipulate them, and exploit them.”
― Kate O'Neill, Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces

“And all of it generates a data trail. All of it is trackable somewhere at some level, and much of it is traceable to this location.”
― Kate O'Neill, Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces

“The best way for marketing to “know the customer” now is to truly function as a knowledge center, iterating through efforts to connect with customers, optimizing for insight, seeking to create more meaningful relationships with customers by getting clearer and clearer about what different people value for different reasons.”
― Kate O'Neill, Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces

“The most human-centric way to think about innovation is to ask, “What is going to matter?”
― Kate O'Neill, A Future So Bright: How Strategic Optimism and Meaningful Innovation Can Restore Our Humanity and Save the World

“The Tech Humanist approach is an attempt to make the world better by making technology better—better for business and better for humans.”
― Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

“Can we do a better job of solving the problems that humanity faces if we behave as though—not wondering if—we can?”
― Kate O'Neill, A Future So Bright: How Strategic Optimism and Meaningful Innovation Can Restore Our Humanity and Save the World

“The future of humanity depends not on benevolent robots but on benevolent businesses.”
― Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist: How You Can Make Technology Better for Business and Better for Humans

“Resilience, in a sense, is applied optimism.”
― Kate O'Neill

“To consider meaning at any level implies a search for the depth and dimensions of what is significant, what truly matters.”
― Kate O'Neill, Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces

“Many of the reasons why digital transformations, strategic transformations, and cultural transformations sputter, stall, or fail entirely is because they meet with human resistance to change on a personal level.”
― Kate O'Neill, A Future So Bright: How Strategic Optimism and Meaningful Innovation Can Restore Our Humanity and Save the World