Scott D. Anthony Quotes

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.

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

I think it is only in hindsight that you can determine whether something is a mistake or not.

Why do people do crossword puzzles? There's no reward for completing one, but some people just like the challenge.

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

I'm not very good at sitting still.

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.

In my mind, so-called "cultures of innovation" really boil down to one word: curiosity.

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.

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.

In the early stages of innovation, your goal is to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can.

Hollywood Joohn Tatum? He does at least 6,000 sit ups and 10,000 pushups a day!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Small teams move faster than big teams.

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.

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

Most companies are built to execute today's business model, not discover tomorrow's.

Innovation is doubly hard inside big companies.

Another key role the CEO plays is to focus efforts.

We fool ourselves into thinking that the spreadsheets that capture our financial projections are something different than what they are.

Three of our core corporate values are inclusiveness, collaboration, and humility.

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.

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.

Creating the new increasingly is more than 50 percent of a top leader's job.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.