"For
everyone
of
our
failures,
we
had
spreadsheets
that
looked
awesome."

- Scott Brown,
Intuit

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Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 07:25 AM | Comments (2)

What do Henry Ford, Miles Davis, Thomas Edison, Confucius, Robert Louis Stevenson, Horace, Robert Kennedy, Sir Laurence Olivier, Thomas Watson, Beverly Sills, Douglas McArthur, Winston Churchill, Malcolm Forbes, John Barrymore, Paramahansa Yogananda, and Charles Kettering have in common?

An enlightened view of what "failure" is.

If you want to innovate, you will first need to let go of your notion of what failure is all about...

"An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots." -- Charles Kettering

"Do not fear mistakes. There are none." -- Miles Davis

"The way to succeed is to double your failure rate."
-- Thomas Watson, Founder of IBM

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently."
-- Henry Ford

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." -- Confucius

"Give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself." -- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it." -- Horace

"I have not failed once. I've just found 10,000 ways that didn't work." -- Thomas Edison

"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
-- Robert F. Kennedy

"No matter how well you perform, there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy." -- Sir Laurence Olivier

"If your life is free of failures, you're not taking enough risks."
-- H. Jackson Brown

"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try." -- Beverly Sills

"I failed my way to success." -- Thomas Edison

"99 percent of success is built on failure." -- Charles Kettering

"Act as if it were impossible to fail." -- Dorothea Brande

"Failure is success if we learn from it." -- Malcolm Forbes

"You can only be as good as you dare to be bad." -- John Barrymore

"The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success." -- Paramahansa Yogananda

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down." -- Mary Pickford

"Never give in, never give in, never, never, never never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." -- Winston Churchill

"We are not retreating -- we are advancing in another direction."
-- Douglas MacArthur

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -- Thomas A. Edison

"Fall seven times, stand up eight." -- Japanese Proverb

"Stumbling is not falling." -- Portuguese Proverb

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:19 AM | Comments (7)

"Never
tell
people
how
to
do
things.
Tell
them
what
to
do
and
they
will
surprise
you
with
their
ingenuity."

-- General George Patton

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

As a resident of Woodstock, NY, I am proud of my town's legacy of love, creativity, and compassion. The legacy continues on Friday 4/23. That's when the Haitian People's Support Project and Evelyne Pouget will be producing a fabulous concert and dance, in Kingston, NY, featuring Haiti's #1 band Boukman Ekperyans -- to raise funds for five Haitian orphanages. $25 at the door. $20 in advance. If you can't attend, give anyway. The "Haitian News Cycle" is over, but not the need for food, water, infrastructure, and hope for the future.

"If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one." - Mother Teresa

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." - Winston Churchill

"The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving." - Albert Einstein

"The wise man does not lay up his own treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own." - Lao Tzu

"For it is in giving that we receive." - St. Francis

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)

It's recently dawned on me that a lot of the readers of this blog have no clue what the authors of this blog actually do -- or what companies we (Idea Champions) have helped along the way.

So... in case you are wondering... take a look.

We've worked with just about every industry on planet Earth. Our clients have included: GE, AT&T, Lucent, General Mills, Chubb Insurance, Coca Cola, Allianz, Met Life, Con Edison, Goodyear, Michelin, MTV Networks, A&E Television, Merck, Pfizer, NBC Universal, Atlanticare, Mitre, Pricewaterhouse, Towers Perrin, Gap, Rio Tinto, Duke Corporate Ed, Dover Corp, Fuqua School of Business, Citibank, Scotia Bank, Babson College, MBooth & Associates, and a host of other forward thinking organizations.

Oh, I almost forgot, our Free the Genie tool is going virtual in about a month or so. Want a preview? Let us know.

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Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at 01:31 PM | Comments (0)