Scott D. Anthony
I think the most important thing to do is to recognize the fundamentally different circumstances of pursuing growth.Collection: Thinking
I think it is only in hindsight that you can determine whether something is a mistake or not.Collection: Mistake
Creating the new increasingly is more than 50 percent of a top leader's job.Collection: Jobs
In the strengthening the core job, a leader can draw on their past experiences. After all, in most cases they did the job of the people that are reporting to them! So they know when something is screwed up, they know the risks worth taking, and they know the corners to cut. But when they are creating the new, no one knows what the right answer is.Collection: Jobs
There's a general belief that failure is the friend of the innovator, but I've come to view it a different way.Collection: Views
The school at which you studied - design school, disruptive school, TRIZ school, user-centered innovation school, etc - determines the specific words you use.Collection: School
The curious company studies the anomalies or the unexpected findings. The company that isn't curious ignores them or punishes people who don't do exactly what they set out to do.Collection: People
Three of our core corporate values are inclusiveness, collaboration, and humility.Collection: Humility
People who copy what exists copy a point-in-time artifact, and if you are managing the process correctly you are already hard at work on the next thing.Collection: People
Now, I worry a bit about the TEDification of the world where style trumps substance, so hopefully you have a good blend of both!Collection: Worry
You have to make the decision about whether you want to avoid or you want to overcome the resistance.Collection: Decision
If you are trying to improve the performance of existing operations in known markets, it is an analytical problem where it's just a question of aligning your execution engine in the right way. If it is about creating something new and different, you can't derive the right answer analytically.Collection: Creating
You have to chip away at it and shape it to let the winning idea emerge.Collection: Winning
I'm not very good at sitting still.Collection: Sitting Still
Avoiding along some dimensions is easy. Create organization space and bring in some new talent so the innate cultural resistance is less material. Unfortunately, it's rarely that easy.Collection: Organization
Some people who were central to former success aren't the right people for your future success.Collection: People
What looks like resistance in many cases is rational responses to incentives and ingrained resource-allocation processes.Collection: Looks
The reality is customers lie - not because they want to want to deceive you, but because they don't do a good job of predicting what they will do in the future.Collection: Jobs
It would be fun too to put some of the great philosophers and political scientists of the past couple centuries into a time machine, have them look at the world today, and see what they think. Imagine Schumpeter, Malthus, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, and more! That would be good fun.Collection: Couple
The number one thing I urge people to remember is it is all about being scientific about managing strategic uncertainty, while striking the important balance between being thorough and being flexible.Collection: Numbers
Leaders today face challenges for which they are utterly unprepared.Collection: Leader
People who live in more than two countries are more successful innovators.Collection: Country
I'm suggesting that principles meant to deal with uncertainty that occurs naturally can be useful to manage the uncertainty that characterizes any new idea.Collection: Ideas
If you work on a new product launch, spent time in a new geography, or work to develop a completely new skill, you have no choice but to figure out new ways to solve problems.Collection: Skills
I have a fear right now that what I call the advertising-narcissism complex is sucking up way too much top talent.Collection: Too Much
I find social media as fun and engaging as the next person, but imagine if all the creative talent that was pouring into finding increasingly clever ways for us to broadcast daily banality (and then serve ads based on what is learned) instead focused on some of the UN Millennium goals? The world would be a better place.Collection: Clever
Bring different groups together internally, send them out to visit other companies, or bring in interesting speeches. Show that you love learning by having people on staff whose job it is to explore without any near-term metrics. Publicly shut a project down and talk about what a great job a team did because they learned so much. And so on.Collection: Jobs
Another key role the CEO plays is to focus efforts.Collection: Keys
In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer. The decision-making systems here are meant to deal with the reality that decisions about innovative ideas will rely on patterns and intuitions. The best venture capital organizations deal with this challenge by staging investment, actively participating in startups they fund, tying decisions to learning as opposed to artificial dates on the calendar, and assembling a diverse team of decision-makers.Collection: Team
In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer.Collection: Asking
It's very easy to skip steps when documenting an idea.Collection: Ideas
We fool ourselves into thinking that the spreadsheets that capture our financial projections are something different than what they are.Collection: Thinking
Think about how you will start and where you will go. Get the head with logic and the heart with visuals or stories. And think about your core customer and all the other stakeholders as well.Collection: Heart
Successful strategies adhere to a basic pattern.Collection: Successful
Document, evaluate, focus, test.Collection: Focus
First you document your idea. You should be comprehensive, but that doesn't mean you have to produce a doctoral thesis length plan. Rather you want to make sure you have touched all the different things that have to happen to succeed. Then, you evaluate your approach. The goal here isn't to figure out if your idea is good or bad, but rather to begin to figure out what are some of its weakest elements.Collection: Mean
Why do people do crossword puzzles? There's no reward for completing one, but some people just like the challenge.Collection: People
Good innovators are careful observers, network extensively, run experiments, ask lots of questions, and find ways to bring diverse ideas together. Overarching all of this is an intrinsic interest in working through puzzles.Collection: Running
Checklists are really helpful ways to remind people around how to manage complicated tasks.Collection: People
The reality is sometimes markets don't exist for very good reasons. It might be that there isn't a deep customer need. Or the economic model is just hard to pull off. Or maybe there is a regulatory barrier.Collection: Reality
It takes a great deal of humility to recognize you have made a wrong turn on the road to successful innovation, but better to stop and try a radically different approach then to continue down the wrong route for too long.Collection: Humility
Most companies are built to execute today's business model, not discover tomorrow's.Collection: Today
Data about an innovative idea is rarely crystal clear.Collection: Data
Innovation is doubly hard inside big companies.Collection: Innovation
Seeking chaos is at least one way to develop the skills and mindsets to tackle ambiguity.Collection: Skills