Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead it needs to concentrate on what people feel.

The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.

our tendency to attribute our successes to a planned and scientific approach and to play down the part of accidental and unplanned factors in our success is misleading and possibly even limits our scope for innovative work.

We assume that the progress must appear as neat in the moment as it can be made to seem in retrospect, and we want ideas to be as straightforward in their formulation as in their analysis

If you propose any solution where the gain in perceived value outweighs the attendant expenditure in money, time, effort or resources, people either don’t believe you, or worse, they think you are somehow cheating them.

the problem is that when ‘the rules are the same for everyone’ the same boring bastards win every time.

we naturally assume that something that only does one thing is better than something that claims to do many things.

Bits deliver information, but costliness carries meaning.

The bureaucrats to whom he must justify his activities, however, demand reasons right from the beginning to justify funding,