Summary: Peter Thiel’s Zero To One
Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur and investor who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and was an early investor in companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn, also …
Innovation
Paying for Outcomes
Iconic typography designer Paula Scher discusses her creative process, including the famous Citi logo. Interestingly, the idea came to her in seconds and that presented a problem for the client. They …
Einstein on The Essential Feature of Productive Thought
“Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” *** There is a view, to which we subscribe that a lot of innovation and creativity comes from the combination of worldly …
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
The problem with most business books is they present a formula for problems that ultimately have no formula. You’re reading something with no practical value and you’re not really learning …
Why We Miss Creative Ideas That Are Right Under Our Noses
Here is an interesting excerpt from an interview with Jennifer Mueller and Shankar Vedantam, author of The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and …
Quiet: Why Introverts Have a Creative Advantage
In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain looks at how our lives are shaped by personality. The book explores how where we land on the introvert-extrovert …
The 7 Myths of Innovation
In The Power of Why Amanda Lang argues that innovation is simpler than you think. One reason we’re endlessly focused on expert innovation, or as she calls it, innovation window dressing, is our …
The Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators
In The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, authors Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen uncover the origins of “innovative-and often …
Your organization sucks at innovating
It’s easy to make your organization more innovative if you stop trying to show everyone how innovative you are. What can you do to add more innovation to your organization? A question, no doubt, …
Evolution is Blind but We’re Not
The first thing we do is try to figure out what went wrong. When people in organizations evaluate poor outcomes, determining what went wrong, and why is one of the first steps. Once we have a cause, …
The Seven Characteristics of Effective Creative Teams
All of the work I’ve been doing looking at how creativity and insight emerge—from Graham Wallas Stages of Control to a technique for producing ideas and Gary Klein’s triple path—focuses on …
The Remarkable Way We Gain Insights
In 1936 Graham Wallas, co-founder of the London School of Economics, published The Art of Thought, outlining the four stages of the creative process. This pre-dates, by at least a decade, James …
A Technique for Producing Ideas
In the foreword to James Webb Young’s book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, Keith Reinhard asks, “How can a book first published in the 1940s be important to today’s creative people …
Marshall McLuhan: Old Versus New Assumptions
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), for those unfamiliar with him, rocketed from an unknown academic to rockstar with the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964. The core of the …
John Holland: The Building Blocks of Innovation
“Most innovation comes from combining well-known, well-established, building blocks in new ways.” *** John Holland, a professor of two vastly different fields—psychology and engineering—at …
Are Cities More Innovative?
Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small …