Scott D. Anthony on Generating and Then Launching Great Ideas: An interview by Bob Morris

AnthonyScott D. Anthony is the managing partner of Innosight, a global strategic innovation consulting and investment firm. Based in the firm’s Singapore offices since 2010, he has led Innosight’s expansion into the Asia-Pacific region as well as its venture capital activities (Innosight Ventures). He has worked with clients ranging from national governments to companies in industries as diverse as healthcare, telecommunications, consumer products, and software. Scott has written extensively about innovation. He is the author of The Little Black Book of Innovation (2012), The Silver Lining (2011), and most recently, The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas Into the Market, published by Harvard Business Review Press (Harvard Business Review Press (May 6, 2014). He co-authored the eBook Building a Growth Factory (2012) with his firm’s colleague, David Duncan, Seeing What’s Next (2004) with Harvard Business School Professor and Innosight co-founder, Clayton Christensen, and was the lead author of The Innovator’s Guide to Growth (2008).

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Morris: Before discussing The First Mile, a few general questions. First, from which [begin italics] non- [end italics] business book have you learned the most valuable lessons about business? Please explain.

Anthony: That’s a great question. I am a passionate baseball fan (one of the best moments of 2013 was life conspiring to get me to game 6 of the World Series in Fenway Park), so I would nominate any book by Bill James. James and like-minded researchers and writers showed the world how to look at baseball in a different way. Through analyzing data and then designing and running simulations they challenged conventional wisdom, overturned orthodoxy and drove fundamental changes in talent evaluation and in-game tactics. It showed me how the principles of good scientific exploration can lead you to see the world in a fundamentally different way.

My second choice here probably would be one of the recent books focused on behavioral economics and social psychology, such as Dan Ariel’s Predictably Irrational or Daniel Hahnemann’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. That vein of research shows how bad us humans are at making certain types of decisions, which I think is at least one reason why The Innovator’s Dilemma persists 20 years after Christensen first started publishing the results from his research.

Morris: Here are several of my favorite quotations to which I ask you to respond. First, from Lao-tse’s Tao Te Chin:

“Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.”

Anthony: This resonates strongly with what we are trying to do to make Innosight really a different type of consulting company. Three of our core corporate values are inclusiveness, collaboration, and humility. We start with a premise that our clients are smart, well-intentioned people. They know their business and industry, and we never pretend that we could possibly know it better. We however have a set of tools and approaches about managing strategic transformation. Our goal is to enable our clients to do things that they couldn’t do on their own, and then get out of the way. It doesn’t happen overnight, of course, but it leads to the kind of lasting impact to which we aspire.

Morris: From Albert Einstein: “Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler”

Anthony: Something that guides me every day. I think people make innovation much more complicated than it needs to be. The school at which you studied – design school, disruptive school, TRIZ school, user-centered innovation school, etc – determines the specific words you use. But everyone knows innovation involves developing unique understanding of a market, thinking expansively to develop a solution, and then finding a way to test rigorously and adapt quickly. That doesn’t make it easy, of course, but so many people tell me that they aren’t creative or they aren’t innovative, and it’s just not true.

Morris: From Howard Aiken: “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

Anthony: You used this as the title for your review of The First Mile, which I thought was great. I think broadly people worry too much about showing their hand, for two reasons. First, every great idea emerges out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation. 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. The second is people will try to copy what they can see, which is the final product or service, but it’s much harder to see (and copy) all the intricacies of the business model that allows you to create, capture, and deliver value. And that’s what you need to get right to really jam something down people’s throats!

Morris: From Richard Dawkins: “Yesterday’s dangerous idea is today’s orthodoxy and tomorrow’s cliché.”

Anthony: You could replace this with “the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed” and it would have the same basic effect. Almost every disruption starts at the perceived fringes of today’s market. It is one reason why we, like great design companies like IDEO, are dogmatic about spending time in the market’s periphery. Every leader needs to watch what teenagers or startup companies – or startup companies headed by teenagers – are doing today, because many of those behaviors will be mainstream behaviors tomorrow.

Morris: From Isaac Asimov: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) But ‘That’s odd….’”

Anthony: I’ve come to the conclusion that the core characteristic that separates companies that get innovation from those that don’t is a simple word: curiosity. History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that’s penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational. 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. There’s a general belief that failure is the friend of the innovator, but I’ve come to view it a different way. In the early stages of innovation, your goal is to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can. Therefore, aside from the equivalent of blowing up the lab or letting a pathogen escape, the only failure is spending too long or too much money to learn.

Morris: Finally, from Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

Anthony: One of Christensen’s truly great contributions was identifying this thing called “overshooting.” That is, improving a product or service to the point at which further improvements aren’t valued by the customer. A kind of glib example of this is the poor engineer that added the 53rd button on their remote control. Companies get into grooves and they keep sharpening what they are doing, when in fact what they really need to do sometimes is to stop and do something completely differently. More broadly, I find it remarkable how prescient almost all of Drucker’s stuff continues to look. He had a great gift of clear thinking and writing from which the world continues to benefit.

Morris: In one of Tom Davenport’s recent books, Judgment Calls, he and co-author Brooke Manville offer “an antidote for the Great Man theory of decision making and organizational performance”: organizational judgment. That is, “the collective capacity to make good calls and wise moves when the need for them exceeds the scope of any single leader’s direct control.” What do you think?

Anthony: I feel for today’s leaders. I really do. They got to where they are by doing a series of jobs exceptionally well. And that doesn’t help them at all with the challenges they now face. Any leader has two jobs to do. To do what they are currently doing better and more efficiently (call this strengthening the core), and to do what they are not currently doing but will need to do in the future (call this creating the new). 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.

This is where principles of good experimentation – have a hypothesis, design the experiment, analyze the results – and collective judgment take over. But those aren’t muscles leaders had to develop to earn their promotions. And creating the new increasingly is more than 50 percent of a top leader’s job. Boy, is that a tough challenge.

Morris: Here’s a brief excerpt from Paul Schoemaker’s latest book, Brilliant Mistakes: “The key question companies need to address is not ‘Should we make mistakes?’ but rather ‘Which mistakes should we make in order to test our deeply held assumptions?'” Your response?

Anthony: I think it is only in hindsight that you can determine whether something is a mistake or not. I think the most important thing to do is to recognize the fundamentally different circumstances of pursuing growth. There is what Steve Blank calls the stage where you are searching for a scalable business model. Then, there is the stage when you have found that model and need to scale it. In the former stage you have to have a “beginner’s mind,” be in learning mode, and expect to learn things you didn’t anticipate. You’ll look back on the journey and see that you had lots of assumptions that proved to not be true, but with that mindset and approach it doesn’t feel like a misstep or mistake, it just feels like what it felt like when you learned how to ride a bike and got progressively better with practice.

Morris: The greatest leaders throughout history (with rare exception) were great storytellers. What do you make of that?

Anthony: When you are motivating people to do amazing things, you have to win over both their rational side and their emotive side. I’ve never seen impeccable logic be sufficient to win both the heart and the mind. It’s one of the underappreciated skills required by an innovator – they have to be able to convince lots of people to do things that might not be fully rational (invest in the company, join something that is likely to fail, try a product they’ve never seen before), and if you can’t tell a good story it is just very hard to make that happen. Now, I worry a bit about the TEDification of the world where style trumps substance, so hopefully you have a good blend of both!

Morris: Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original (perhaps unrealistic) expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature, the result of what James O’Toole so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.”

Here’s my question: How best to avoid or overcome such resistance?

Anthony: First, you have to make the decision about whether you want to avoid or you want to overcome the resistance. 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. If you are a large company and you want to do something unique, you almost by definition have to tap onto the core business in some way. Otherwise you are going into a naked fight against startups, and that’s just a tough place to be.

I think my colleague Clark Gilbert, who is the CEO of the Deseret News and Deseret Digital, has the issue pretty well nailed. He has created what he calls a “capabilities exchange” to thoughtfully and carefully manage the link between the core business and his new growth business. Of course, even that’s not enough, because as Gilbert notes, transformation also requires you to rethink your current business. He has found that has required coming up with a central motivating purpose, identifying the unique things that the re-positioned core can do, and making sure you have employees that are up for the new task.

Unfortunately that might mean that some people who were central to former success aren’t the right people for your future success. This is very tricky stuff, because what looks like resistance in many cases is rational responses to incentives and ingrained resource-allocation processes.

Morris: Of all the great innovators throughout history, with which one would you most want to share an evening of conversation if it were possible? Why?

Anthony: That’s an incredibly tough question, Bob. It is kind of a cliché but the first name that pops to mind is Thomas Edison. I think if anything history underrates him as an innovator. His ability to turn his ideas into impact was really unusual. 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.

Morris: Long ago, Thomas Edison observed, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” Your response?

Anthony: Edison is full of good quips, isn’t he? I’m partial to his assertion that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, which makes the same basic point. Anyway, I absolutely agree. My first job out of college was with McKinsey, and a good strategy consultant thinks that the crux of impact is problem solving skills. Those are critically important, no doubt, but as Clark Gilbert says, “Strategy is never more than 49% of the answer.” I think it comes down to circumstances. 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. You still want to be thoughtful about what you do, no doubt, but you have to learn through trial-and-error experimentation as well.

Morris: When and why did you decide to write The First Mile?

Anthony: The idea first began to coalesce at an innovation conference in Amsterdam in 2010. I was there to share some general thoughts about innovation inside corporations, and while listening to the discussion, I decided at the last minute to ditch my presentation and share 10 ways that the people in the audience would lose their jobs because they wouldn’t achieve commercial objectives. I had just taken over responsibility for the part of our business where we incubated and invested in startups, which was already beginning to shape my thinking about the topic. It was also the beginning of the popularization of what now is called the Lean Startup movement to try to bring discipline to the creation of new businesses. It seemed that some of the perspectives I was developing were unique, and others were additive, so it seemed worth turning into a more fully formed set of ideas.

Morris: Were there any head-snapping revelations while writing it? Please explain.

Anthony: I don’t know that anything quite gets up to the level of head-snapping, but I’ve always found that working through ideas in written form really changes the thinking. So, the two key acronyms in the book – DEFT and HOPE – really emerged during the writing process. We had always advised people to follow those steps, but we didn’t quite have the words around them. The idea of using the principles of good science to manage strategic uncertainty really came together as well. But for me at least, it’s kind of like working on a sculpture. You have to chip away at it and shape it to let the winning idea emerge.

Morris: To what extent (if any) does the book in final form differ significantly from what you originally envisioned?

Anthony: Ha! Any of my published books are at least the third full version of the book, and the best version would have been the fourth that I figure out six months after publication. The biggest change was a shift in architecture. The first version started out by listing all of the problems before providing the backbone DEFT process. That flipped around in the next version of manuscript to get quickly into how to succeed before talking about how you might fail. If I were to do the book again I would re-do the chapter on first mile traps, instead highlighting a few key lessons that we’ve learned in slightly plainer language. I’m not very good at sitting still.

Morris: Before embarking on the perilous journey of bringing a new or improved product to market, you suggest that the potential value of the given idea should be determined according to three criteria. What are the most important do’s and don’t to keep in mind during a rigorous consideration of each. First, it must address a legitimate market or customer need.

Anthony: The most important thing here is to largely ignore what customers say, and instead watch what they do or track where they spend money. 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. As Steve Jobs said, “It is the not the customers job to know what they want.” On the flip side, if you invest the time to understand the customer better than they know themselves, if you know the things they want or need even if they can’t articulate it, you can begin to develop a good sense as to where there really are unmet needs in the market. And there are shortcuts as well. Anytime you see a constrained market, where consumption is limited to those who have special skills or are wealthy, that signals an opportunity for innovation.

Morris: Next, it must address the need in a reliable and compelling way.

Anthony: Here, I suggest that people watch out for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called “unknown unknowns.” You can always figure out how to deliver things in somewhat controlled situations, but when you start to get into the reality of the market you start to figure out what isn’t going to work. You can increase the odds of spotting the weak points in your approach if you really think about the end-to-end business model you plan to follow – how you plan to create, capture, and deliver value. Make sure that you take the time to think about how other companies might respond to your idea, both those companies already in the market you plan to target as well as others that might imagine targeting that market. Fortune favors the prepared mind!

Morris: Finally, it must be capable of creating value according to metrics that are relevant to the opportunity.

Anthony: This one is easy. We fool ourselves into thinking that the spreadsheets that capture our financial projections are something different than what they are. A spreadsheet for an innovative idea reports the mathematical relationship between made up numbers. You can’t cash a spreadsheet. Of course, it is worth it to take the time to think carefully through your assumptions, and ensure you at least have hypotheses around how you will create value. But use the analysis as a way to focus attention on the most critical assumptions, rather than spend a ton of time massaging the numbers. The other miss here is not spending enough time thinking about the measuring stick for your idea. What does “value” mean to you? Of course if you are launching a new business you can thinking about revenues, profits, and so on, but metrics such as customer satisfaction or employee retention might be meaningful if you are focusing more internally.

Morris: In your opinion, what are the defining characteristics of innovative thinking?

Anthony: I generally adhere to the research recounted in The Innovator’s DNA by Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen that 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. Why do people do crossword puzzles? There’s no reward for completing one, but some people just like the challenge. Good innovators like to solve business crossword puzzles. (I have to credit Karl Ronn, one of the sharpest minds out there for this one – he has a book coming out soon called The Reciprocity Advantage, which is a great read.) The journey is the thing as much as anything else.

Morris: What is the DEFT process and what specifically does each stage of that process accomplish?

Anthony: DEFT is meant to be a way to bring structure to the management of scientific uncertainty. 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. Next, you focus on the most critical strategic uncertainties, the ones that really are make-or-break for your business. Finally, you test rigorously, and adapt quickly. Document, evaluate, focus, test. Be DEFT, and innovation success can be yours!

Morris: As I indicate in my review of the book for various Amazon websites, there are dozens of passages throughout your narrative that caught my eye.

For those who have not as yet read The First Mile, please suggest what you view as the most important point or key take-away in each of these passages.

First, The Scientific Method and Strategic Uncertainty (Pages 14-19)

Anthony: I’m not proposing anything novel in the book – rather 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. Researchers like Mintzberg and McGrath have provided the academic underpinning of this idea, so I am trying to help translate that into the practitioner’s toolkit.

Morris: The Next Step: Twenty-Seven Innovation Questions (29-33)

Anthony: I’ve found these 27 questions cover just about everything behind any innovative idea. It forces you to make sure you have thought about the customer you are targeting, the nature of your idea, how you will deliver it, who you will work with, and more.

Morris: Four Watch-Outs (39-44)

Anthony: It’s very easy to skip steps when documenting an idea. The four watch outs basically are all balances to strike. Have a core concept, but wrap it in a full business model. 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.

Morris: Pattern-Based Analysis (47-50)

Anthony: Successful strategies adhere to a basic pattern. Take Christensen’s idea of disruptive innovation. All disruptive innovators make it easier and more affordable for people to do what matters to them, and follow a strategy that doesn’t at first glance make sense to the market leader. We’ve turned that into a more comprehensive way to screen that we use in our ventures business. It really helps to clarify what is good about an idea, and what needs improvement.

Morris: How to Prioritize Uncertainties (69-81)

Anthony: At its core, the idea is to ask two questions. First, how certain am I? Then, what is the impact if I am wrong? Anything that has low certainty or has a lot of impact should be tested early. Also think about how much it costs to learn more. Sometimes you want to build confidence by knocking off the easy things.

Morris: Keep Teams Small and Focused (84-89)

Anthony: Small teams move faster than big teams. One of the biggest mistakes large companies make is creating innovation teams that mirror all the functions of the core business. Those teams make no progress because they spent forever updating each other on what they are doing versus really crushing the most critical problems they need to address. Most startup companies have two people, and they figure out creative ways to swarm problems. They move faster and have more impact. Jeff Bezos has a rule at Amazon.com that teams working on disruptive ideas need to be small enough that they can be fed by no more than two pizzas. That’s spot on.

Morris: “The First Mile Readiness Check List” (137-138)

Anthony: Checklists are really helpful ways to remind people around how to manage complicated tasks. The 14 points on the first mile readiness checklist summarize the DEFT process in as simple terms as I possibly can.

Morris: Challenge #1: Make a Wrong Turn (144-168)

Anthony: I use the term “fool’s gold white space” to highlight a common problem for innovation. People see a market that doesn’t exist, and assume that one should exist. But 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. 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.

Morris: Decision-Making Systems That Pierce through the “Fog of Innovation” (172-191)

Anthony: Innovation is doubly hard inside big companies. Not only do innovators have to deal with all of the fundamental challenges of innovation, they have to do so in an environment that often is implicitly hostile towards innovation. After all, most companies are built to execute today’s business model, not discover tomorrow’s. One complexity is what I call the fog of innovation. Data about an innovative idea is rarely crystal clear. 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.

Morris: Seek Chaos (199-206)

Anthony: As mentioned, leaders today have it tough. They face challenges for which they are utterly unprepared. Seeking chaos is at least one way to develop the skills and mindsets to tackle ambiguity. 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. It is at least one reason why you see research that shows that people who live in more than two countries are more successful innovators.

Morris: Parting Thoughts (207-208)

Anthony: The book ends with a few specific pieces of advice that attempt to summarize the key messages in the book. 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.

Morris: In your opinion, of all the material provided in The First Mile, what will be of greatest interest and value to those who are about to embark on the aforementioned “perilous journey” within a Fortune 50 company??

Anthony: I would point to two things. First, chapter five describes best practice in designing and executing experiments. While these best practices are general, the need to be thoughtful about experiment design is particularly acute within large companies, since some of the behaviors, such as having small teams and tapping into low-cost resources to maximize flexibility, won’t come naturally to many people inside huge companies. Then, chapter seven specifically talks about the structures required to support strategic experimentation inside large organizations. The sad truth is as difficult as the first mile can be for entrepreneurs, it is doubly tough inside most large companies as innovators can face some significant headwinds.

Morris: Years ago, during dinner in San Francisco with a venture capitalist, I asked him what was most important to him and his associates while poring over proposals to decide with which applicants to meet. He replied, “Basically, we keep three questions in mind. The first two are obvious: Who are you and what do you do? The third question really does separate the wheat from the chaff: Why should I care?” What are your own thoughts about all this?

Anthony: I find it interesting that the venture capitalist framed it in a very self-centered way (the prominent “I” in the question). When we are looking at ideas, we really are thinking of three things. Are you doing something that seems consistent with the patterns of success? Are there reasons to believe you have or can access the right people to make it happen? Can we play a unique role in enabling success? We all have our rules of thumb, I suppose…

Morris: When sharing “Parting Thoughts,” you offer six “six pieces of advice,” adding “And, above all else, [begin italics] be bold [end italics].” Please explain.

Anthony: We’ve got some great big problems in our world. We have to figure out how to feed 10 billion people. Too many people can’t access clean water, quality healthcare, and reasonable education. We have to figure out what to do about climate change, income inequality, and more. Innovators need to rise to the challenge! I have a fear right now that what I call the advertising-narcissism complex is sucking up way too much top talent. 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.

Morris: Let’s say that a CEO has read and then (hopefully) re-read The First Mile and is now determined to establish or strengthen a workplace culture within which innovative thinking is most likely to thrive. Where to begin?

Anthony: In my mind, so-called “cultures of innovation” really boil down to one word: curiosity. The CEO should ask what he or she can do to raise the organization’s curiosity quotient. One way to do this is to seek to learn more about current or prospective customers, not to figure out which segmentation model to slot them into, but to really understand them as human beings. Another is to live at the intersections where innovation magic occurs. 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. Another key role the CEO plays is to focus efforts. One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is to embrace the idea of spurring creativity by letting hundreds of flowers bloom. I’ve never seen that lead to anything other than cynicism and hundreds of dead flowers.

Morris: For more than 25 years, it has been my great pleasure as well as privilege to work closely with the owner/CEOs of hundreds of small companies, those with $20-million or less in annual sales. In your opinion, of all the material you provide in The First Mile, which do you think will be of greatest value to leaders in small companies? Please explain.

Anthony: I’d point to the very last chapter that describes leadership challenges we will all encounter over the coming years. I’m proud of the fact that Innosight exists 14 years after its founding. That seems a strange thing to be proud of, but it’s actually quite unusual in our fiercely competitive industry. We still exist – and are growing robustly – because we’re a restless organization that is always changing. That’s the only way to succeed in the face of continual change.

Morris: Which question had you hoped to be asked during this interview – but weren’t – and what is your response to it?

Anthony: Bob, I’ve never been asked a more comprehensive set of questions! Masterful, as always. So, that requires some real thought. I suppose one question might be the degree to which the first mile has personal applicability as well. While I didn’t push the angle in the book too much, I think it absolutely does. The toolkit in the book is all about approaching situations where you know a little and are assuming a lot. As a parent of three young children that sounds like every single day to me! So I hope readers find little gems that can help them with their day-to-day life as well.

* * *

Scott cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:

Link to Creative Innovation talk on the 4th era

Link to talk at Google

Linkto interview on the book with Harvard

Link to Innosight/The First Mile

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