More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
it may be best to move back and forth between focused attention and inattention.
(McNerney quoted an old John Steinbeck line: “A difficult problem at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”)
(The designer George Lois, who claims some of his best ideas have come while meandering through the Metropolitan Museum, says, “Museums are the custodians of epiphanies.”)
force your brain off those predictable paths by purposely “thinking wrong”—coming up with ideas that seem to make no sense, mixing and matching things that don’t normally go together. Proponents of this approach say it has a jarring effect on creative thinking;
Choose a high number and a low number (say 342 and 5); go to page 342 in the dictionary and find the fifth word. Try to come up with ideas based around that word; take the word apart and rearrange letters to find other words; then repeat the process to come up with a second word, and see if you can form an interesting combination with those two words; you can even advance to a three-word combination if you like.
the Idea Generator app will randomly select and combine three words for you when you shake your smartphone.
As Winston Churchill once said, “The trick is to go from one failure65 to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.”
If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.”
when it comes to feedback, “dissonance can actually be more valuable than resonance.”
diversity fuels creativity.
website, Not Impossible Labs, designed to help innovators connect with each other and find great problems to work on together.
Should mission statements be mission questions?
He saw that a number of successful, market-leading companies in the tech sector and other industries were getting blindsided by newcomers offering products or services that may not have been as good, but were simpler, more convenient, and more affordable.
doing all the right things: serving their customers better, improving their products, increasing their profit margins.
To pursue disruptive innovation at the low end, companies would have to move away from all they had worked so hard to build.
“Company leaders are realizing that if they’re only asking the small questions, it’s not going to advance their agenda, their position, or their brands. In order to innovate now, they have to ask more expansive questions.”
American businesses in particular, and many major post–World War II European companies, “were designed on a military model that came out of the war, built by people who’d been through that war, and the businesses were organized around that mind-set,” Patnaik says. Central to that was the idea of a formal hierarchy and chain of command that didn’t leave much room for calling into question the accepted practices and procedures.
“The industrial economy was all about4 knowing the answer and expressing confidence,” Ries said. “If you did your homework, you were supposed to know. If you had unanswered questions, that meant you did a bad job and wouldn’t get rewarded.”
“organizations don’t even know what they don’t know.”
a quest to fill an unmet need, to make some aspect of our lives a bit easier, more convenient, more enjoyable.
To figure out the internal values, Yamashita urges company leaders to look back in time and consider this question: Who have we (as a company) historically been when we’ve been at our best?
If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do? Grove and Moore reasoned that a new leader would feel no emotional attachment to the declining memory-chip business and would probably leave it behind. So they did likewise,
(While contemplating a world in which your company did not exist, another question worth considering is Who would miss us? The answer to that can help clarify who your most important customers are and what your real purpose is.)
one of the most important questions companies should ask regularly is What should we stop doing?
What if money were no object? How might we approach the project differently?
What if we were to compete against ourselves?
What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves? Answer: they’d launch an assault on the digital front. Knowing that news aggregation was killing magazines, they started their own “killers,”
What if we could only charge ten bucks for our hundred-dollar service?—it forces a rethinking of real-world practicalities and assumptions.
What does the world need most . . . that we are uniquely able to provide?
What is something I believe that nearly no one agrees with me on?
Where is the place we can be a start-up again?
“There is an overcelebration of getting things done,”
Bertrand Russell once said, “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing36 now and then to hang a question mark on the things you take for granted.”
So if you don’t like the level of questioning in your organization, and you’re in senior management, look in the mirror.”
It’s also critical for company leaders to be on the lookout for ways in which questioning gets punished—though the punishment may not be obvious or intentional. The operative question is If an employee asks questions at our company, is he or she asking for trouble?
one of the best ways to stimulate curiosity among any group of people is simply to expose them to as many original ideas and unusual viewpoints as possible.
What if a job interview tested one’s ability to ask questions, as well as answer them?
tell every person coming in for an interview to bring a few questions with them. Make it clear those questions should be ambitious and open-ended—Why, What If, and How questions are recommended. These should also be relevant to your company or industry.
Before we “lean in,” what if we stepped back? What if we start with what we already have? What if you made one small change?
