Time & Perspective Quote by Jesse James Garrett

Garrett is selling a particular kind of optimism: not the sunny kind, but the managerial faith that shared understanding can be engineered, and that doing so pays compounding returns. The first sentence sounds like a civics slogan, yet it’s really a workflow prescription. “Everybody” isn’t just moral inclusion; it’s an operational demand that information stop bottlenecking in specialists, silos, and gatekeepers. He’s arguing that knowledge distribution is a form of infrastructure.

The subtext is a quiet critique of how organizations typically fail. Teams don’t stall because people lack talent; they stall because they’re perpetually re-litigating basics, translating between departments, and correcting mismatched assumptions. “Less time spent explaining things” points to the hidden tax of modern work: context switching, repeated onboarding, and the exhausting labor of getting everyone to mean the same thing by the same words. In that frame, documentation, transparency, and cross-functional literacy aren’t bureaucratic chores; they’re liberation.

The second sentence reframes creativity as something that emerges after clarity, not before it. That’s a distinctly product-and-design-world sensibility (even if he’s labeled simply “businessman”): innovation isn’t a lightning bolt, it’s what you get when the room shares a map. Of course, there’s an implied trade: the up-front cost of making knowledge legible to “everybody” can be high, and power rarely likes to be diluted. Garrett’s intent is to normalize that investment by making it sound like common sense - because, in healthy organizations, it is.