The Myth of the Garage

by Chip Heath

We are witnessing the birth of a sticky idea:

Why did the ad campaign stick? Is it fair? And what would you do next if you were a soda executive?

It’s no surprise why the ad stuck: It packed an emotional punch. It abandoned the typical statistico-caloric factoids about soda and, i...

That’s what sticky ideas do – they make people...

Change comes from feeling,...

what if talent is more like an orchid, thriving in certain environments and dying in others?

Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance, Groysberg

So talent is not, in fact, perfectly portable, even in a job that is one of the most independent around

depend heavily on an array of resources inside their firms.

group of people who didn’t suffer the lag in performance after transferring: women.

alpha-male culture

forces them to compensate by beefing up their external networks, whi...

the only way to take control of your firm’s talent pool is to create it yourself.

When you own the talent factory, you’ve created a permanent competitive advantage. So if one of your stars leaves, you can simply wish him the best of luck on his new bus. And then grow another star to take his place.

Incentives are dangerous, and not just because people game them. They often yield collateral damage.

Yet incentives are still the first resort of most managers.

We all think we’re smart enough to create the perfect carrot.

Why are we so bad at anticipating the effects of our well-intentioned incentive plans? The answer has to do with something that psychologists call a “focusing illusion.”

focusing too much on a single variable.

Focusing illusions even distort our judgments about ourselves.

flipped the order of the two questions.

incentive puzzle.

To be fair, there are some contexts where one variable dominates.

But chances are you don’t live in a one-variable world. In your complicated, squishy, matrixed world, if you’re dreaming up an incentive plan, you’re almost certainly in the grips of a focusing illusion.

You’re trying to maximize or optimize or minimize something. And you may unwittingly find that when you maximize the length of your programmer’s code, you end up minimizing your job tenure.

There’s another option. In a maddeningly multivariable environment, great management trumps great incentives, for the simple rea...

Incentives are dangerous. Good managers aren’t. So forget about that jet engine and get back to the slow, messy business of actually interacting with your employees.

brilliant innovation

information wasn’t helping anyone because only the AHA knew about it.

How do you spread a new idea – fast – and get people ...

Innovations require lots of ...

Explanations require lots of attention, but atte...

So don’t explain. Instead, anchor in what peop...

anchoring is easier than explaining from scratch

Breakthrough technologies often need an anchor so customers can grasp them.

The only downside to anchoring is that, by hooking into existing ideas, it creates sameness.

Sameness helps people understand what you’re doing. But to sell something, you usually need difference.

That’s why a good innovation story couples an anchor with a twist.

This craving to break the mold is understandable. After all, your colleagues are probably proudest of the things they’ve created that are unique. But making something is different than explaining it—from a communication standpoint, similarities are your friends. So anchor away.

winnable fronts opened up:

new psychological research suggests that grit – defined as endurance in pursuit of long-term goals and an ability to persist in the face of adversity – is a key part of what makes people successful.

grit can be an underappreciated secret weapon.

“Grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment,”

Grit is not synonymous with hard work.

single-mindedness.

An ungritty prison inmate will formulate a new plan of escape every month, but a gritty prison inmate will tunnel his way out...

big goal pursued in small increments, as well as a kind of “siege mentality.”

Grit is tough because you don’t get the psychic payoffs that come with an exciting discovery or a shift in direction. You rarely get big wins to celebrate. In fact, you may never truly win.