Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles F. Kettering

Kettering’s line lands like a garage-door slam: clean, loud, and engineered to make a point. Coming from an inventor who spent his career shipping real things into the world, it’s not a cute aphorism about teamwork; it’s a warning about what happens when responsibility is diluted into procedure. “Kill” is the tell. He’s not saying committees slow ideas down. He’s saying they smother them, politely, with agenda items and “stakeholder” consensus until the original spark is unrecognizable or safely postponed.

The intent is tactical: defend experimentation against bureaucracy. Committees optimize for risk management, not discovery. Their incentives reward avoiding blame, producing documents, and selecting the least controversial option. Innovation, by contrast, needs someone to take a swing in public and possibly miss. A committee can’t miss; it can only defer, qualify, or compromise.

The subtext is also about power. Committees often exist to distribute authority so no single person can act decisively. That’s great for governance and terrible for invention. When every voice must be heard, the loudest or most cautious voice tends to win, because “no” is cheap and “yes” is accountable.

Context matters: Kettering helped build modern industrial R&D inside big organizations. He wasn’t naive about scale; he understood that large firms need coordination. That’s why the jab cuts deeper: it comes from someone who watched bureaucracy grow alongside innovation and saw the moment the process started acting like the product. The quote isn’t anti-collaboration. It’s pro-ownership: one clear champion, a fast prototype, and fewer meetings that exist mainly to make everyone feel safe.