The first group of remarks are from non-business creators -novelists, composers, playwrights. We in the corporate world could do well to listen to them on this subject. The principles they follow will also work for us. All we must do is add a few dollar concepts: "Will it sell?" "Will it make the organization run smoother?" "Will it add to the public image of the company?" "Will it increase the income of the company?" The second group of quotations is from businessmen who have managed to be both imaginative and dollar-wise.
Experts on Imagination-Artists
The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration. - Ernest Newman
Many writers have told me that they have built up mnemonic devices to start them off on each day's writing task. Hemingway once told me he sharpened twenty pencils; Willa Gather that she read a passage from the Bible (not from piety, she was quick to add, but to get in touch with fine prose; she also regretted that she had formed this habit, for the prose rhythms of 1611 were not those she was in search of). My springboard has always been long walks. - Thornton Wilder
The formula for a good novelist: Ninety-nine percent talent… ninety-nine percent discipline… ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. - William Faulkner
I don't know that it [the idea of a novel] comes. A more appropriate image for me might be that I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end with a skyscraper of wood. - Norman Mailer
When asked to say something about inspiration, Jean Cocteau replied: It is not inspiration: it is expiration. He also said that there can be some help toward inspiration from a depressant. Extreme fatigue can serve.
Experts on Imagination-Executives
The age of change is not an age for the unimaginative, the frightened, the timid. It is an age for the bold thinkers, the ingenious, the pace setters. It is to these pathfinders that success and all its fruits will accrue. - William C. Ridgeway, Jr.
Most companies are interested in performance, not conformance. This is not to say that a young man who comes into a large company and looks for the protective coloration of conformity cannot find it. He can. All he has to do is perform exactly and without imagination the tasks he is asked to perform, shun additional responsibilities of all kinds, and keep silent except possibly to discuss a change in the weather-and no one will ever notice him. Nor will he ever rise above his routine tasks to a managerial position. Certainly, he misses the point of managing-and I am not at all sure that he doesn't miss the point of living. - Henry Ford II
You can't sit on the lid of progress. If you do, you will be blown to pieces. - Henry Kaiser
In business the earning of profit is something more than incident of success. It is an essential condition of success; because the continued absence of profit itself spells failure. - Louis D. Brandeis
If you wait for inspiration you'll be standing on the corner after the parade is a mile down the street. -Ben Nicholas
Our vast progress in transportation, past and future, is only a symbol of the progress that is possible by constantly striving toward new horizons in every human activity. Who can say what new horizons lie before us if we can but maintain the initiative and develop the imagination to penetrate them-new economic horizons, new horizons in the art of government, new social horizons, new horizons expanding in all directions, to the end that greater degrees of well-being may be enjoyed by everyone, everywhere. - Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
Five minutes, just before going to sleep, given to a bit of directed imagination regarding achievement possibilities of the morrow, will steadily and increasingly bear fruit, particularly if all ideas of difficulty, worry or fear are resolutely ruled out and replaced by those of accomplishment and smiling courage. - Frederick Pierce
The important thing is that each of us do his part and do it as well as he can-doing, as Carlyle says, not what lies dimly at a distance, but what sits clearly at hand. In doing so, we find that there is ample room within our society for individualism, just as there is ample necessity for cooperation. And it is as we learn to distinguish the conformity of behavior from the conformity of thought that we approach the real significance of the term "success." - Crawford H. Greenewalt
A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. - Charles M. Schwab
An office boy with an eighth-grade schooling who has developed his creative imagination has a greater chance for success in life than the university graduate who has failed to put his imagination to work. - Irwin Ross
There are some people who think that an idea is to be rated like wine: the older, the better. The resort to antiquity's cellar may yield vinegar as often as it produces wine. - Aaron Levenstein
Ideas lose themselves as quickly as quail, and one must wing them the minute they rise out of the grass-or they are gone. - Thomas F. Kennedy
Tame a wild idea but don't break its spirit. - Harry Pesin
I can't give you any formula for success, but I can give you a sure formula for failure-try to please everybody. - Herbert Bayard Swope
Everyone knows the basic steps in creating-absorption, assimilation, gestation, creation, evaluation. But knowing about them is quite different from understanding them. The enlightened management knows the creative process is a series of directional acts that move toward the most accurate resolution. - Lawrence D'Aloise
