15 Powerful Ideas

“You cannot look in a new direction by looking harder in the same direction.”
~ Edward deBono

“Out there is an entrepreneur who’s forging a bullet with your company’s name on it. You’ve got only one option – to shoot first.”
~ Gary Hamel

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
~ Charles Mingus

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
~ John Steinbeck

“What would have drawn a “wow” fifteen years ago won’t draw a yawn today.”
~ Steve Wynn

“If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.”
~ Ross Perot

“The mind is like a garden, plant flowers, you get flowers. Plant weeds, you get weeds. Plant nothing, you get weeds.”
~ Unknown

“Man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it.”
~ Chinese Proverb

“One can never truly savor success until first tasting adversity.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

 “Only the humble improve.”
~ Wynton Marsalis

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”
~ General Erick Shinseki

“Children are happy because they don’t have a file in their minds called ‘All the Things That Could Go Wrong.’”
~ Marianne Williamson

“Don’t stumble over something behind you.”
~ Seneca

“Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who couldn’t hear the music.”
~ Unknown

Read More

New Thinking for the New Era of Business

Albert Einstein famously noted, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that we used when we created them.” In our post-COVID world of ...

When an Astronaut Needs a Pen

Ever get stuck on a problem, only to realize you're solving for the wrong thing? That's exactly what happened when the rocket scientists at NASA ...

How Shake Shack Drives Innovation

Do you prefer the crispy mozzarella, tempura watercress, and black garlic mayonnaise cheeseburger or the pumpkin mustard, bacon, cranberries, and sage hot dog? For something ...

Lady Gaga’s Secret to Creativity

Just before she won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, I watched Lady Gaga dazzle the live audience with a pitch perfect performance of ...

Creativity: Does Size Matter?

For some reason, we’ve been taught that for creativity and innovation to count they need to have a magnitude the size of the 1989 San ...

The Lexicon of Creativity

There’s more confusion around the meaning of the word innovation than the chaos at the airline ticket counter after a cancelled flight. Is there a difference between ...

The Brain Science of Becoming More Creative

When we hear stories about iconic leaders like Salesforce.com’s founder Marc Benioff, or widely celebrated virtuosos like Lin-Manuel Miranda for that matter, we immediately think ...

Correct the Overcorrect

When the misguided leaders at Enron, Tyco and Worldcom committed fraud and marred their shareholders with huge losses, the Securities and Exchange Commission rightfully swooped ...

Learning to Color

Fact: Creativity has become the most needed skill in business. It’s gone from a nice-to-have to becoming mission-critical. Fact: Creativity is a learnable skill. All humans have ...