100 kepner quotes

© 2015 Thinking Dimensions Global
100 Kepner Quotes
Chuck Kepner’s Words of Wisdom in
Innovation, Decision Making, Problem Solving,
Collaboration, and more…
www.thinkingdimensions.com/resources/blog/kepner

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INNOVATION

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As some ancient wise-ass put it, “If it was
easy to do, somebody would have already
done it.” Breaking new ground is hard,
hard work.

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Thinking about innovation… People most readily accept
new ideas that are consistent with the values and
concepts they already have. They tent to reject new ideas
that are inconsistent with what they “know to be right.”
If there is a conflict between the new ideas and the old,
established ones, they try to find a way to make the new
ones fit the old ones. That’s the way it has been since the
days of the caveman. That is the barrier we have to face
in getting them to accept the ideas of innovation.

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Very often, the ﬁrst alternative suggested is
greeted with open arms. “Hey that’s a good
idea,” and the search is over. The best ideas
usually come out later, after people have
had a chance to think about it.

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There is another, more tragic, reason why
managers are not as creative as they could be.
Creativity demands extra eﬀort.

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New ideas are always out there.
Where?
Out there, held by people who haven’t been
asked to contribute yet.

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Anyone can make an ordinary decision, do
the same old, indeﬁnitely, time after time.
That’s safe and conservative, can’t be
criticized as radical. And it can’t get anyone
or anything ahead, either. So it isn’t really
safe, after all.

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It is useless to tell other persons, “Now think
creatively.” HOW? What do we DO? But it is
easy to teach others a series of behaviors, a
process to follow when a decision has to be made.
Do this, do that, do another thing. Then, when a
creative conclusion emerges, these people will say,
“Wow! We thought of this ourselves!” And they
will be right!

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You don’t teach how to be innovative or
creative. It’s there as a characteristic of the
human animal. You create the conditions
within which it can come out and be active.

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Ideas are not ephemeral, pixie-like
packages of information ﬂoating in the air.
Knowledge for any individual comes from
experience, whether that be from books,
lectures, incidents that have been observed,
or face-to-face encounters.

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As the storehouse of knowledge grows, so
do the possibilities of associations between
the items tucked away in the recesses of the
brain. Combinations are formed and more
complex associations are ﬁled away. As you
know more, you can do more with what
you know.

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Why are some companies more successful than
others?...
…We don’t think it’s a mystery. We think it’s the
quality of thinking in the organization. They
come up with innovative solutions to their
problems more often than others.

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“If you could only bottle that and sell it,” we
said, “You could do wonders. The world would
be yours.” Well, now you can. You can
engineer Logical Innovation, and apply it and
control it, whenever and however you want.

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From a fantasy wish of a few years ago,
innovation and creativity have now become
a reality tool for any manager to use to
guarantee progress and improvement.
Learn it, use it, and enjoy being out in front
of the pack.

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The invention, the ﬁnished product, was the
result of sifting through vast bodies of
information to ﬁnd combinations of ideas
that could be translated into reality, into an
entity that would work in the practical
world.

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Model of Innovation

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The secret of the Logical Innovation
Process is its structure and discipline.

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When most people speak of innovation or
creativity, they think of some ability that is
mysterious and ephemeral, a capability that
some people have and others don’t, and that lies
beyond the bounds of logic and rationality,
something almost magical. We disagree. We
think that innovation is a supremely logical act.

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…creativity is a force that you can
control and engineer to do just what you
want it to do.

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What is an innovation? It is the
combination of elements that have not been
combined before, to perform a speciﬁc
function. It is a new way of doing
something, better than the previous way.

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[Thomas Edison] had an idea about an electric
light. He talked it over with some of his people
and they decided on what they would have to
know to make a successful design… Finally they
were able to pull all their ﬁndings together and
voila! There was the light! He got the credit, as he
should, but they all made contributions, without
which there would have been no light.

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Innovation is the life-blood of our
being human.

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Innovation is the backbone of civilization. It
is the only creator of progress.

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Over the last twenty thousand years, the
process of innovation has created the world
as we know it, and will continue to re-create
the world of humans for all the foreseeable
years to come. Innovation is the backbone of
civilization. Without it, we would be nothing.

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Steel wool had been around for a long time.
Someone added soap, gave it to the housewives
as a new type of scrubbing pad, and made a
million dollars. Someone added ridges to the
wire paper clip and made another million
bucks. You know the stories and they’re all
true. If you want to get ahead and be creative,
add something new to your decisions, go beyond
what has always been done.

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There is nothing magical about creativity.
It is practical common sense applied to the
real and ordinary world.

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Creative decision making is the way
progress occurs.

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We exist in a competitive society. One manager
makes a few more creative decisions than the
others, and he or she is a genius. One
organization ﬁelds more creative decisions than
the others and it becomes a leader in the
industry… If you want to get ahead, learn how to
reach out for that additional idea or fact that will
make your decision creative.

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DECISION-MAKING

The fate of the organization is determined
by the sum-total of the decisions made in its
behalf. It can never be greater than those
decisions provide, although it can quickly
become less as other poor decisions
undermine the good decisions that have
been made.
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Questionable decisions are being made all
the time, based on questionable decisions
that were made last week and last year, and
far back into history.
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“When in doubt…”, you should pull
someone else’s thinking into the equation.
What can you lose? Nothing, compared to
what you would gain if you found just one
little critical fact that would make a
diﬀerence.
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Research has shown that half the decisions that
are made in big organizations are failures, can’t
be implemented, or don’t do the job if they are
put into eﬀect. Mix in politics and religion and a
raw thirst for power and self-interest, and the
score is even worse. And these are the decisions
which determine how we and our children will
live for the next umpteen years!
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Nothing happens until someone makes a
decision. Until someone says, “We’ll do
this,” nothing moves, nothing changes. It’s
a basic law of physics. Until some new force
and direction enters into the picture,
everything is static and at rest. But there’s
more to it than that…
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There is no progress, no improvement over
what has been, unless someone has made a
CREATIVE DECISION. Not just any
decision, but one which incorporates new
ideas or a new way of viewing old ideas.
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The results of solitary decision making are
usually not outstanding, although there are rare
exceptions. Decisions made in the secrecy of one
skull are most often forced upon the outside
world, implemented by edict, and accompanied
by the questionable plaint, “This will really be
good for you and you’ll grow to like it.”
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Events are dictated by decisions, and many,
if not most, decisions are pure damn lousy.
If we can but plant a seed of dissatisfaction
and a glimmer of how to make them better,
we will have contributed a whole heap to
our culture and its history.
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All I can say, after forty-four years, working with
hundreds of organizations in sixty diﬀerent
countries, is that I know of only who things about
management that are always true, everywhere, at
every level, all the time. The ﬁrst is “Nothing
happens until a decision has been made.” And the
second is “If the decision you are making now isn’t
better than the last one you made, you’re in trouble.”
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It’s hard to tell what all the consequences of
an act might be, but you owe it to yourself
to use all the information you can get to
make the very best decision you can, and at
least try to see what undesirable eﬀects it
might also create. Perhaps that will lead
you to be a little more careful.
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A decision is like the ignition switch in your
car. It starts things. Until it is turned, your
car and your organization consist of a
bunch of inanimate parts waiting for the
juice that will bring them alive and let them
do what they were intended to do.
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If you are going to spend one hour making
a decision, take that same hour and spend it
on being innovative.
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Every decision is a bridge from here to there, from
where you are to where you want to be. It follows the
same process that is followed by the master engineer:
ﬁrst, an abstract vision, then the abstract requirements
needed to make it so, and ﬁnally, the physical acts and
conditions which will translate the vision into a
successful entity within the world of reality, that will
satisfy the purpose for which it was conceived.
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Very few bridges collapse because of inadequate
design, but a lot of business decisions do. Our
experience suggests to us that two-thirds or more
of the decisions made by management are not
nearly as good as they could be. Why? Because
managers don’t have to be as careful as bridge
builders and the results aren’t so visible.
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It should be a rarity that a business
decision fails, not that half or more of them
go silently down the tube.
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…we have found that most decisions that
fail, do so because vital information, readily
available to the decision maker, was ignored
and not used.
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In almost every case, business decisions fail
because the truth of the reality situation
has not been fully understood by the
decision maker.
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If you are a manager, and want to get from
here to there, build a decision bridge that is
complete, stout, easy to implement, and will
be serviceable for a long time.
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A decision is good if it lays out a clear
course of action that is consistent with the
reality within which we exist and moves our
interests forward. That is to say, it works.
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Managers who make good decisions, time
after time, anticipate the kinds or
categories of information they will need,
before they ever try to formulate
alternative actions.
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If you want to make a decision which will
be used and will last, make a creative one
that incorporates the best thinking of your
informed, key people.
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“Nobody told me,” is a hell of a poor excuse
for having a decision fail, just as “I didn’t
know it was loaded” is a weak reason for
having an unexpected problem or
consequence come up after a decision has
been made, although they are put forward
time after time.
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Decision making is THE critical act of
management. It is the start of all action,
good, bad, and indiﬀerent.
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CREATIVE DECISION MAKING:
It took the opening up of our thinking, and
the interchange of our information, and the
combination of our thoughts to create this
new and better process.
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Looking back, in my forty-plus years of
experience, I am not aware of ANY decision
that has broken through to new ground
without the help of new information
supplied by new sources.
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Every decision that comes your way is an
opportunity to improve what you are doing,
to make some progress, however large or
small.
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Every decision you make must be a creative
decision or you’re cheating your
organization and throwing away an
opportunity that will never come again.
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A decision is the product of many separate
judgments, arranged in a logical sequence,
each step contributing to the next. A
creative decision is one that reaches out at
certain steps, for additional information
that would otherwise be missed if an extra
eﬀort were not made to pull it in.
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Every decision requires a clearly deﬁned
objective, and every decision can only move
forward if speciﬁc requirements or criteria
are delivered from that objective so a
judgment can be made as to which
alternative best does the job.
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If decision making is THE critical act of
management, upon which all else depends -
and we say it is - then equipping your
people to reach out beyond the ordinary is
the wisest investment you can make.
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By reaching out to others who might well
know something we don’t know, and
opening up the thinking of the decision
makers to new data and new ideas, at
certain critical points in the process, we
have made it possible for entirely new
solutions to emerge.
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No decision is complete until a plan for its
implementation has been made. It must be
practical, workable, or it’s just words.
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The state of the organization exactly
reﬂects the ability of its decision makers.
They make it what it is and what it will or
can ever be. So if you want to improve the
organization, improve its decision making.
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Think what might happen if every decision
that is made, and every problem that is
solved, reached out in such a way for the
new and better result? I don’t know what it
would be like, but I’d like to ﬁnd out.
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PROBLEM SOLVING

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…if you don’t establish trust with your
people and ask the right questions, the
cause of your problem may forever remain
a mystery.
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I suppose there are problems and decisions
that are dead ends. There is no answer, no
solution, no action is possible. I can only say
I have never met such a situation. There has
always been some forward motion, some
progress toward a better resolution.
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All that was necessary was to bring these
informed people together and get them to
thinking in concert about the same thing. The
power of their combined knowledge solved the
problem in half an hour. Of course, if these
people had been invited to make inputs to the
plan in the ﬁrst place, all this ﬂap would have
been avoided…
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Debugging must draw upon the knowledge
of the people who live with those bugs and
conditions every day of their working lives.
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You visualize the ideal outcome. You
visualize the ideal solution to your problem
in detail, as it would be when in place: what
it will look like, what it will do for you and
your organization, what it will have to be in
order to achieve your purpose. This ideal
result is your target.
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You reach out by expanding your view of
the possibilities. If you go to the same old
sources and get the same old facts, you will
produce the same old answers.
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When there’s a leak in the boat, the ﬁrst
priority should be to stop it. When an
organization is bleeding eﬀort, money, and
opportunities wasted because of
questionable decision making, perhaps it’s
time to upgrade and modernize the abilities
of its managers.
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Ask questions, search the information out.
Someone knows something that you don’t,
otherwise you’d have solved the problem
long ago.  
 
If you don’t reach out, you’ll never know.
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COLLABORATION

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The knowledge and information about how
to make the information more practical and
simple and what bugs to expect are held by
those people to the level at which the
actions will be implemented.
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We teach that decision makers should reach
out for the inputs of others, because the
body of relevant information is too large
and complex for any one or two persons to
have it all. If any doctrine can be taken as
true and invariable, in my judgment and
experience, it is this.
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No one knows everything there is to know,
no matter how much of a genius he or she
is. Everyone has to learn, from infancy on
up, bringing in knowledge from the outside.
It can’t come from any other place, can it?
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You get the task, reach out for relevant
information and experience; you give it room and
freedom to be expressed, understood, and
combine with other ideas; you narrow down to
the most feasible, then you guide them through
the steps that will allow them to put their ideas
into a streamlined practical action.
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Most managers have resident values and concepts like these:
• I am the leader. Don’t nobody challenge what I say. If
I said it, it’s law!
• I know more than you do. That’s why they pay me big
bucks!
• It’s a sign of major weakness to accept what someone
lower on the corporate ladder says is right,
particularly if I think somewhat diﬀerently.
• My colleagues will think I’m an undigniﬁed wimp if
I go around asking for advice from people who aren’t
in their league.
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Most of what we know about working with
other people we learned in our play with
other children.
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Humans dislike having actions forced on
them when they don’t understand how or
why they have come about. They feel they
have been left out, that their needs and
valid experience have been ignored, and
that there is some ulterior motive that has
occasioned the secrecy.
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Talk without a structure or process to
follow is rambling chit-chat. It has no place
to go because no pathways have been
marked out for it.
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It all boils down to this: outstanding
managers are quickly able to get their
people to collaborate, to think and work
together in a parallel fashion, so they can
beneﬁt from the experience and knowledge
of their best informed colleagues.
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Thinking together, using all the brainpower
available and all the experience gathered over
the years makes more sense than continuing to
rely upon the trial and error method of
putting people together and hoping that
something good will come from it.
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We can consciously create the conditions
and skills of collaboration. And when we
do, we help create better managers who can
make better decisions and ﬁnd better
answers to the questions that face us all.
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The knowledge of others is a blessing, an
untapped, underutilized resource that is
asking to be contributed. Take it. Explore
it. Mine it for the help it can give you. It’s
free and it works!
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You don’t have to know everything
yourself. You only have to know HOW to
reach out for the new ideas, new techniques,
and new relationships, in order to produce
a better decision. Once you know how, you
can be creative every time you turn around.
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If a stalemate exists, it is because the needed
information is not available and can’t be
supplied by the sources that have been tapped.
There is a need to shuﬄe the deck, bring in new
people who have had diﬀerent experiences and
know some item of information that has not
been considered before.
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DIVERGENT-CONVERGENT
THINKING

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The dynamics of thinking, logic, wisdom
from experience, and the ability to diverge
to ﬁnd new ideas, and converge to put them
all together in a practical way, apply
equally to the individual and to the
individual working with other people.
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By integrating divergent-convergent
thinking into the problem solving, decision
making process, I believe we have found a
way to insert creativity into decision
making.
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The process is simple: Open up to new
ideas, combine them, narrow down to what
will work in the real world. Then reﬁne it,
ﬁne-tune it, remove the barriers to its
success.
Divergent, convergent.
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If there are new experiences to be had, this
process will uncover them. Not that much
uncovering is needed; they will ﬂow out as
though under hydraulic pressure. The
people who have new information want to
share it, want it to be recognized and
understood. New ideas will burst out if you
give them a chance. And this creative
process does just that.
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OTHER STORIES AND WISE WORDS…

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Nothing that a human being makes or
perceives is ever perfect.
We all make mistakes.
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Then, sitting in a bar and thinking over my misspent
life, I came to the startling conclusion that all the
wondrous decisions and problem solutions I had led
others to, wasn’t because I was all that smart but
rather because I had the right people there, who
knew the stuﬀ that was needed, and asked the
process questions that would get them all thinking
about the same thing at the same time. I made them
reach out and stretch their brains. Voila!
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Reminds me of the time I was poled up a
river in Fiji in a dugout canoe by a man in
his late twenties, seven feet tall and four feet
wide, wearing a skirt and weight at least
295 pounds, singing in a high falsetto like
he was a 10-year-old from the Vienna Boys
Choir. Look straight ahead, Kepner, and
don’t smile. Remember his pappy ate
people like you.
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Everything works out if you wait long
enough. Sooner or later, the opportunity
for a big move forward comes along. If you
are ready, alert, and willing to go, sooner or
later you will get the propitious chance.
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Don’t talk or write unless you have
something to say. If this dictum had been
followed since the birth of the alphabet
some 6,000 years ago, think how much
further along we’d be!
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‘Knowledge is power,’ they say. If you know
the important things before you act, you are
in control…period.
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Few things happen that have never
happened before, that cannot be fore-
shadowed by a recollection and
understanding by someone, of what has
happened in the past.
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To understand an event – past, present, or
future – you must ﬁnd the tracks that exist
from this or similar events and interpret
them, and so reconstruct the message about
what has taken place or is about to.
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The old folks used to say that cream rises to
the top. It does, although sometimes it is
slower than you would like. But excellence
in managing will be recognized.
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If you aren’t moving forward, you’re
moving backward, because your
competition is always trying to get ahead of
you.
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Most progress comes by tiny increments, little steps
one after another. The ﬁrst airplane we saw up close
and got a ride in was a World War 1 Jenny, built in
1917, two open cockpits in a bi-winged contraption of
wood and fabric and wire. The last time we ﬂew
across the Atlantic was in a Boeing 777, representing
85 years of progress. Not in a huge leap from Jenny
to 777, but a series of millions of little improvements
to the craft and knowledge of aeronautics.
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…if we make it too clear and easy, people
won’t think we’re professionals or that
we’re teaching anything important. Pride
and ego! But if it turns out to be more
useful… maybe they’d remember us for
something even more outstanding than our
professionalism and lofty gobbledegook.
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100 Kepner Quotes
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