We learned the value of research in World War II.Collection: History
At 13, I realized that I could fix anything electronic. It was amazing, I could just do it. I started a business repairing radios. It grew to be one of the largest in Philadelphia.Collection: Amazing
I hope that the institution will succeed in maximizing students' potential in the same way. I will give all of my stock to this institution. It will own the Bose Corporation and be funded by the Bose Corporation.
The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household.
The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.
I loved music, and in my ninth year at MIT, I decided to buy a hi-fi set. I figured that all I needed to do was look at the specifications. So I bought what looked like the best one, turned it on, and turned it off in five minutes, the sound was so poor.
We did experiments with the Boston Symphony for many years where we measured the angles of incidence of sound arriving at the ears of the audience, then took the measurements back to MIT and analyzed them.
One hundred percent of our earnings are reinvested in the company, and a great deal of that goes to research.
There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.
At MIT, I had the good fortune for seven years to teach network theory, which is basic to many disciplines, to one-third of the undergraduate student body. It was an experiment to see how high we could bring their level of understanding, and it exceeded all of my expectations.
I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by M.B.A.’s. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.Collection: Running
If you think something is impossible, don't disturb the person who is doing it!Collection: Thinking
There is an enormous inertia that prevents people from change. You must always remember that it is impossible to make something better if you don't make it different - the converse is not true, of course. You cannot make something better unless it is different. And different scares the life out of so many people.Collection: People
Invention is arrived at by intelligent stumbling.Collection: Intelligent
No one ever won a chess game by betting on each move. Sometimes you have to move backward to get a step forward.Collection: Inspirational
I never went into business to make money.Collection: Making Money