People who are good at forecasting, including innovators, are good at changing their minds; an uncommon attitude. Changing ones mind contradicts the conventional wisdom of relying on experts for right answers. Truthfully, experts have no place in predicting future events because when it comes to discovering and predicting the unknowns, experts are overrated.
How so?…
in Innovation, Leadership
There’s a reason everyone wants to work at Google. They solve hard problems, know how to hire and retain the brightest people, give them power and keep them happy. Though, for most people work is a means to an end: a way to make a buck.
It doesn’t have to be this way. …
We all have stories to tell. But it isn’t always obvious. So, how do you find stories to tell? Good question, but they’re very much like coming up with ideas: you have to work hard to develop them.
I listen to quite a lot of podcasts, including The Gist from Slate. In their latest edition they interviewed professional storyteller Matthew Dicks on where he finds the best stories; he talked about ad a daily technique he used everyday to find those stories.…
Our society tends to focus on the big ideas. We love them, me included. But since big ideas have no precedent, no path to follow, the challenge is they require uncommon action; little details that need to be figured out beforehand.
So, everyone likes talking about big ideas. But a very small number of people are actually motivated to figure out the little things that need to be right for that big idea to be delivered.…
When’s the last time you made yourself purposely uncomfortable?
It’s something to think about. When our natural instinct is to constantly seek out comfort…
We are the main obstacle to progress because we continually fail to question everything, including our ideas; it’s really that simple. There is a constant strong force at play, the status-quo bias, that impedes us from getting out of our own way and instead opting to stick with the tried and true. …
What is the main obstacle that stands in the way of sustainable long-term success for any business? I’d argue that it’s culture. A strong culture will recover from mistakes and figure out a way forward; while a weak one will never aim to evolve beyond what it already knows.
With that said, let’s get this out of the way: you must build culture from the beginning. …
What do all creative cultures have in common? The common answer is that in order to figure out which ideas will work, people move fast to implement those ideas. I’d argue that more important than that is the ability to recover from failure just as fast:…