Faisal Hoque > Quotes

“As Einstein’s quote suggests, the framing of the question is an outsized portion of the solution-finding process. And as Clay Christensen told us, when you ask the right question, the answer becomes mechanical. Clearly, we need to be privileging that question-framing process, which has a rhythm of introspection and collaboration, throughout our processes.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“we talked of Zen and entrepreneurship, poetry and products, life and life’s work.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“Relentless Innovation author Jeffrey Phillips favors a possibly apocryphal line from Einstein. The story is that Einstein was asked how he would tackle a particularly tough problem—saving the world, in some tellings—if he had only an hour to do so.6 Einstein’s approach? He’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes solving it. That is, Phillips says, just about the opposite of what executives normally do. He paints a picture of harried execs deciding immediately on a solution, launching into its implementation, and then cooling down with email. It’s all task, task, task—symptomatic of a work culture that’s getting too busy to innovate, that’s become infatuated with efficiency. We might be doing with our time, but are we developing?”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“Over the years, I have realized that life is a process of ongoing transformation spurred by the interlinked qualities of curiosity, purpose, and courage. Whether or not we ask it to, the journey of life tends to make us strong, teaches us to contribute to the best of our abilities, and allows us to pursue a personal legend on our own terms. It is the work of bringing our authentic selves into the world.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“It is possible for organizations to thrive in the innovation economy, but this requires the union of serendipity and process, conceptual understanding and emotional intelligence, theory and practice. In so doing, a company can cultivate perpetual transformation.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“As a society of professionals, we’ve received educations previously reserved for royalty, made travels once only known to explorers, and developed skills in ourselves that are indistinguishable from magic.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“To be a leader is to have a trust in one’s journey. Nietzsche has a Latin term for it: amor fati: the love of fate.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“To borrow a line from Phil Libin, the highly quotable CEO of Evernote, we find that humanizing our working lives is a “sufficiently epic quest” to dedicate our lives to.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“LONG-TERM PLANS, DYNAMIC PRESENT Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“Leonardo da Vinci was a man of mottoes. One of them was saper vedere, “to know how to see.” As we mentioned before, the artist-engineer thought many people knew how to look but few knew how to see. This reminds us of Truman Capote’s admonishment that what Jack Kerouac did was typing, not writing—for writing was much more refined than On the Road. Literary criticism aside, what is it to properly see? How did da Vinci see? As Daniel Gelb reports, da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds featured observations of the movement of birds’ wings so hyper-detailed that they couldn’t be confirmed until the invention of slow-motion film.4 To put it in the parlance of contemporary business-speak, that’s one hell of a core competency, and his observational prowess animated all of his work across the various domains he explored. For da Vinci, sight was the medium, the aperture, or the platform, from which his value would spring.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“Thus, the safer we make the workplace, the more we can make combustible ideas. If we want our people to make stuff explode, we need to give them a safe place to do it. A lot of that safety has to do with time.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

“we cannot have an effective conversation with others if we do not have an effective conversation inside ourselves. By learning how to better frame conversations within ourselves, we can have more grounded conversations with our teams and our world.”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: Cultivating Mindfulness, Creativity, and Innovation for Long-Term Value

“We might be doing with our time, but are we developing?”
― Faisal Hoque, Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability