Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company’s name on it. Somewhere out there is a competitor, unborn and unknown, that will render your strategy obsolete. You can’t dodge the bullet – you’re going to have to shoot first. You’re going to have to out-innovate the innovators.
For the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past.
Power has long been regarded as morally corrosive, and we often suspect the intentions of those who seek it.
Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines.
Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.
Truth be told, there are lots of companies that provide exemplary phone support. DirecTV, Virgin America and Apple are a few that regularly exceed my expectations.
All too often, legacy management practices reflexively perpetuate the past – by over-weighting the views of long-tenured executives, by valuing conformance more highly than creativity and by turning tired industry nostrums into sacred truths.
In the long term the most important question for a company is not what you are but what you are becoming.
As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.
The value of your network is the square of the number of people in it.
Trust is not simply a matter of truthfulness, or even constancy. It is also a matter of amity and goodwill. We trust those who have our best interests at heart, and mistrust those who seem deaf to our concerns.
In the age of revolution it is not knowledge that produces new wealth, but insight – insight into opportunities for discontinuous innovation. Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination. You must become your own seer.
An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety.
Whatever you shoot is dead for a while before it starts to stink. The same goes for strategies. How many organizations carry this dead thing around with them, unaware of its irrelevancy until it is too late?
The opportunities for future growth are everywhere. Seeing the future has nothing to do with speculating about what might happen. Rather, you must understand the revolutionary potential of what is already happening.
The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors.
An enterprise that is constantly exploring new horizons is likely to have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent.
Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.
In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can’t, you’ll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons.
It’s important to remember that innovators in business don’t always get a platform.