Top 40 Max McKeown Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation.”

— Max McKeown

Featured in: Strategy Quotes, Adaptability Quotes

2. “Strategy is about shaping the future.”

— Max McKeown

3. “A great strategy meeting is a meeting of minds.”

— Max McKeown

4. “Strategy and culture should have breakfast together.”

— Max McKeown

5. “The real heart of strategy is the strategist.”

— Max McKeown

6. “Change is inevitable, progress is not.”

— Max McKeown

7. “Brilliant strategy is the best route to desirable ends with available means.”

— Max McKeown

8. “The true parents of creativity are curiosity and necessity.”

— Max McKeown

9. “Before innovation – or practical creativity – there is insight. You must see the world differently.”

— Max McKeown

10. “Strategy is not a solo sport, even if you’re the CEO.”

— Max McKeown

11. “Change is not overcoming inertia as much as it is redirecting, guiding, tweaking what already is and what has already happened. We must believe that we can make choices and that those choices can alter the future.”

— Max McKeown

12. “Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.”

— Max McKeown

13. “With a clever strategy, each action is self-reinforcing. Each action creates more options that are mutually beneficial. Each victory is not just for today but for tomorrow.”

— Max McKeown

14. “Culture is the sum of the values, beliefs and assumptions of human groups.”

— Max McKeown

15. “If there are no new ideas, there is no innovation. And if there is no creativity, there are no new ideas.”

— Max McKeown

16. “If you change the rules of the market, you can be more successful than your competitors.”

— Max McKeown

17. “The task of the strategist and leadership team is to reduce uncertainty in the areas that they can directly influence in order to pursue attractively difficult objectives.”

— Max McKeown

18. “We need to move from comparative advantage to perpetual advantage...”

— Max McKeown

19. “Innovation is new stuff that is made useful.”

— Max McKeown

20. “If life is fast, live faster.”

— Max McKeown

21. “The psychology of individual creativity is about at least three different things. First, creativity is about thinking differently. Second, creativity is about feeling differently. Third, creativity is about focusing, or committing, differently.”

— Max McKeown

22. “You get told to look before you leap. But if you are too careful you may end up just looking.”

— Max McKeown

23. “Let go to get going.”

— Max McKeown

24. “The smart strategist allows strategy to be shaped by events. Good reactions can make great strategy. Strategy involves competition of goals, and the risk is the difference between those goals and the ability of the organization to achieve them. So part of the risk is created by the strategy.”

— Max McKeown

25. “Corporate strategy is usually only useful if you get people engaged with helping you to make it work.”

— Max McKeown

26. “Doing nothing requires effort. Over time, that effort is greater than the effort necessary to improve, or move somewhere better. The trick is to redirect energy.”

— Max McKeown

27. “Strategists who don’t take time to think are just planners.”

— Max McKeown

28. “Following the rules of your industry will only get you so far.”

— Max McKeown

29. “Whenever a maker and a thinker get together, really cool stuff happens.”

— Max McKeown

30. “For most people, it is better to lean towards action rather than inaction.”

— Max McKeown

31. “Innovation can start with wanting what does not yet exist – and finding a solution – or seeing what does not yet exist – and finding an opportunity.”

— Max McKeown

32. “Our need for innovation has shifted power closer to the source of that power-Us. We are the future.”

— Max McKeown

33. “If you don’t start, you’re finished.”

— Max McKeown

34. “If traditional doesn’t work, then traditions won’t do.”

— Max McKeown

35. “The best things happen to those who don’t wait.”

— Max McKeown

36. “Only the right pain gets the right gain.”

— Max McKeown

37. “As an innovator, you need to be aware of how traditions, habits and bias can act as barriers to accepting new ideas.”

— Max McKeown

38. “Nowists get off on getting on, so they run when they could walk, jump when they could sit and dance when they could sit at the edge. They regret inaction, so simply act.”

— Max McKeown

39. “Plug into the anti-obvious power of the rebel. Or get those opposing minds to plug into your purpose, to solve your problem, to reimagine your process.”

— Max McKeown

40. “What are you doing at the moment? How does that compare to your competitors? What do you want to achieve? How can you create something people want?”

— Max McKeown

41. “Problem-insight precedes solution insight. Someone has to recognise a problem before they start to solve the problem...”

— Max McKeown

42. “New ideas are like babies, beautiful, ugly and not finished yet.”

— Max McKeown

43. “Strategy is simple, but simple is complex.”

— Max McKeown

44. “Our human history is the history of ideas. Our human future is the future of ideas. Human desire. Human imagination. Human ingenuity. Creating and copying. Tool-makers and dream-chasers.”

— Max McKeown

45. “Innovators make the previously impossible possible.”

— Max McKeown