Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Scott D. Anthony - Page 2

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.

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.

There's a general belief that failure is the friend of the innovator, but I've come to view it a different way.

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.

What looks like resistance in many cases is rational responses to incentives and ingrained resource-allocation processes.

Seeking chaos is at least one way to develop the skills and mindsets to tackle ambiguity.

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.

The school at which you studied - design school, disruptive school, TRIZ school, user-centered innovation school, etc - determines the specific words you use.

Small teams move faster than big teams.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some people who were central to former success aren't the right people for your future success.

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.

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.

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.

So many people tell me that they aren't creative or they aren't innovative, and it's just not true.

You have to make the decision about whether you want to avoid or you want to overcome the resistance.

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.

Most startup companies have two people, and they figure out creative ways to swarm problems. They move faster and have more impact.

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.

I'm not very good at sitting still.

I've always found that working through ideas in written form really changes the thinking.

You still want to be thoughtful about what you do, no doubt, but you have to learn through trial-and-error experimentation as well.

You have to chip away at it and shape it to let the winning idea emerge.

I've never seen impeccable logic be sufficient to win both the heart and the mind.

I think people make innovation much more complicated than it needs to be.

Now, I worry a bit about the TEDification of the world where style trumps substance, so hopefully you have a good blend of both!

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.

Checklists are really helpful ways to remind people around how to manage complicated tasks.

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.

Think about how much it costs to learn more. Sometimes you want to build confidence by knocking off the easy things.

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.

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.

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.