Steven Sinofsky Quotes

If the work requires smart, talented, creative people, then more than anything, you want to enable folks on the team to create.

- Steven Sinofsky

It is impossible to count the blessings I have received over my years at Microsoft. I am humbled by the professionalism and generosity of everyone I have had the good fortune to work with at this awesome company.

- Steven Sinofsky

While my friends were busy listening to the Talking Heads, Police, and B-52s, I was busy teaching myself to program on the Atari.

- Steven Sinofsky

The best work for creative folks on the team is when the problem is big and the solution escapes everyone.

- Steven Sinofsky

BlackBerry required tethering for some routine operations, and for many, the only way to integrate corporate mail was to keep a PC running all the time.

- Steven Sinofsky

When you delegate work to the member of the team, your job is to clearly frame success and describe the objectives.

- Steven Sinofsky

When you build a product, you make a lot of assumptions about the state of the art of technology, the best business practices, and potential customer usage/behavior.

- Steven Sinofsky

As much as we think of performance management as numeric and thus perfectly quantifiable, it is as much a product of context and social science as the products we design and develop.

- Steven Sinofsky

Despite demand, the BlackBerry avoided offering generalized web browsing support.

- Steven Sinofsky

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

- Steven Sinofsky

Innovation and disruption are the hallmarks of the technology world, and hardly a moment passes when we are not thinking, doing, or talking about these topics.

- Steven Sinofsky

My father, an entrepreneur but hardly a technologist, was looking to buy a computer to 'automate' our family business. In 1981, he characteristically dove head first into computing and bought an Osborne I.

- Steven Sinofsky

At some point, a group of people working towards similar goals will exhibit a distribution of performance.

- Steven Sinofsky

Disruption is a critical element of the evolution of technology - from the positive and negative aspects of disruption a typical pattern emerges, as new technologies come to market and subsequently take hold.

- Steven Sinofsky

I like a good cliche because it reminds you that much of management practice boils down to things you need to do but often forget or fail to do often enough.

- Steven Sinofsky

The industrial revolution that defined the first half of the 20 century marked the start of modern business, typified by high-volume, large-scale organizations. Mechanization created a culture of business derived from the capabilities and needs of the time.

- Steven Sinofsky

When faced with something complex, spend the time to think about some structure, write down sentences, think about it some more, and then share it.

- Steven Sinofsky

The cloud-powered smartphone and tablet, as productivity tools, are transforming the world around us along with the implied changes in how we work to be mobile and more social.

- Steven Sinofsky

Management, at every level, is about the effort to frame challenges, define end states, and allocate resources to navigate between them.

- Steven Sinofsky

It's not cool to have your name in print when it's not the truth.

- Steven Sinofsky

A moment of disruption is where the conversation about disruption often begins, even though determining that moment is entirely hindsight.

- Steven Sinofsky

Assuming a specific resource is high cost is often a path to disruption when someone makes a different assumption.

- Steven Sinofsky

Knowledge created a new culture of business derived from the information gathering and analysis capabilities of first the mainframe and then the PC.

- Steven Sinofsky

With the general availability of Windows 8/RT and Surface, I have decided it is time for me to take a step back from my responsibilities at Microsoft.

- Steven Sinofsky

People love to play expectations games, and that is always bad for collaboration internal to a team, with your manager, or externally with customers.

- Steven Sinofsky

Continuous productivity manifests itself as an environment where the evolving tools and culture make it possible to innovate more and faster than ever, with significantly improved execution.

- Steven Sinofsky

Groups tend to believe their work is harder, more strategic, or just more valuable while underestimating those contributions from other groups.

- Steven Sinofsky

From a product development perspective, choosing whether a technology is disruptive at a potential moment is key.

- Steven Sinofsky

After more than 23 years working on a wide range of Microsoft products, I have decided to leave the company to seek new opportunities that build on these experiences.

- Steven Sinofsky

No matter how you look at it, one person cannot be evaluated and paid in isolation of budgets.

- Steven Sinofsky

Things will absolutely go wrong. In a healthy team, as soon as things go wrong, that information should be surfaced. Trying to hide or obscure bad news creates an environment of distrust or lack of transparency.

- Steven Sinofsky

I've always advocated using the break between product cycles as an opportunity to reflect and to look ahead, and that applies to me, too.

- Steven Sinofsky