Frans Johansson > Quotes

“Leonardo da Vinci, the defining Renaissance man and perhaps the greatest intersectionalist of all times, believed that in order to fully understand something one needed to view it from at least three different perspectives.15”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“It was not even necessary for people to know how to sing to be considered rock musicians. Bob Dylan had no clue, but that did not stop him from becoming one of the greatest artists ever.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Cultural diversity does not only imply geographically separated cultures. It can also include ethnic, class, professional, or organizational cultures. The mere fact that an individual is different from most people around him promotes more open and divergent, perhaps even rebellious, thinking in that person.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Why are we so hesitant about working in diverse teams? The reason is at least in part a function of human nature. Humans have a tendency to stick with people who are like themselves and avoid those who are different. Psychologists have a name for this tendency. They call it the similar-attraction effect.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“All of this suggests that it makes sense to spend significant amounts of time reading and drawing, learning and experimenting, without guidance from instructors, peers, and experts.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Innovations must not only be valuable, they must also be put to use by others in society.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“when the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of believing the genuine pattern, natural selection will favor the false pattern.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, change the world in leaps along new directions.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“With the benefit of hindsight, everything seems obvious. But the reason these people did not connect the dots has to do with how connections and associations happen. The whole reason for bringing in Sargent’s software was to improve Microsoft’s own debugging program—it had nothing to do with fixing Windows. Our mind tends to keep separate concepts apart. It requires something unusual to spark the connection. The opposite of click moments are planned situations with expected outcomes. On their own, these don’t generate the chaos and randomness needed to discover new, unique ideas. They have a harder time shaking the box of concepts, projects, and ideas to form new combinations.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“Interestingly, to be considered creative, it is not enough that an idea is new. To say that 4 + 4 = 35,372 is definitely original, but it hardly qualifies as creative.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Creating diverse teams is one of the best ways to encourage click moments.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“It essentially meant that anyone was allowed to use Linux as long as they did not sell it, and”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Cultural diversity does not only imply geographically separated cultures. It can also include ethnic, class, professional, or organizational cultures. The mere fact that an individual is different from most people around him promotes more open and divergent, perhaps even rebellious, thinking in that person. Such a person is more prone to question traditions, rules, and boundaries—and to search for answers where others may not think to.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Incentives were important in attracting a candidate to accept a particular job, but once on the job it hardly mattered at all. People who are driven to perform do so based on internal drive, not on external incentives. They want to do a good job.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“This book is about two very simple but highly provocative ideas. The first one is this: success is random, far more random than we have come to believe. The second is that there are a number of specific actions that individuals and organizations can take to capture randomness and focus it in our favor.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“Many of the lessons of this book are ones I had to discover through my own process of trial and error. Luck not only matters far more than we’d like to believe, but it is also our best chance to stand apart. As such, there is no one single master plan for success; every journey is unique.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“In 2011 Alabama passed a controversial law meant to curb illegal immigration and bolster the state’s economy. In 2012, the University of Alabama estimated that the law would eliminate upwards of 140,000 jobs, costing the state nearly $11 billion annually.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“A person with low associative barriers, on the other hand, may think to connect ideas or concepts that have very little basis in past experience, or that cannot easily be traced logically. Therefore, such ideas are often met with resistance and sentiments such as, “If this is such a good idea, someone else would have thought of it.” But that is precisely what someone else would not have done, because the connection between the two concepts is not obvious.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“The risk people tend to fear most is not financial loss or wasted time. Rather, it is the risk to their pride, status, and prestige, to what their peers will think of them if they fail.2 In other words, the risk of failure can weigh more heavily than what is at risk.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“You need to do something different in order to become successful and rise above the avalanche of competitors. Success in the future defies logic and prediction because it is and must be random.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“made perfect sense for Microsoft to partner with IBM. But great strategies are not based on what makes sense. Rather, they are based on what sets you apart and what you can reasonably defend. Those types of insights are almost never the result of a logical calculation. Instead, small, fortuitous observations can tip the balance.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“They urge you to stay within your own field—away from the Intersection. It is not that the network is holding you back on purpose. There is no conspiracy.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“At every step of the way, windows of opportunity opened and closed, some of them worked and others did not. Th e hallmark of a great career is never the brilliance of the person behind it—it is the person’s tenacious and stubborn willingness to keep trying until the chips fall in his or her favor. Work hard, try different things, stay unique, but never believe that you can predict what will happen next. Instead, stay open to the possibilities and be prepared to switch plans if things don’t go your way. Sometimes life simply throws you a lot of curveballs. But it is from those curveballs that new and exciting opportunities will start to emerge. You never know what awaits you.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

“For instance, when childproof lids on medicine bottles were introduced, it led to a significant increase in the number of child poisonings because parents became less careful about keeping the bottles away from their children.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“we must employ tactics that allow us to learn as many things as possible without getting stuck in a particular way of thinking about those things.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Together they forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicenter of a creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. The effects of the Medici family can be felt even to this day.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“In a famous 1987 study, researchers Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe from Tubingen University in Germany concluded that brainstorming groups have never outperformed virtual groups.7 Of”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Value networks are needed to succeed within a field. That’s why we form them. And that is, as you may have guessed, where all the trouble starts.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Too much expertise, as we have seen, can fortify the associative barriers between fields. At the same time, expertise is clearly needed in order to develop new ideas to begin with.”
― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

“Or in the words of the famous British historian Arnold Toynbee, “History is just one damn thing after another.”
― Frans Johansson, The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World