Enterprise Innovation Quotes

Resistance obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a high station morally, ethically, or spiritually.

Don't expect others to hand success to you. Create it - with heart, energy and enterprise - and you'll make it come true

Instead of creating controls to compensate for pathological cultures, the solution is to create a culture in which people take responsibility for the consequences of their actions

Building a family is an entrepreneurial experience. No doubt about it. The family is the greatest and most important enterprise on earth. Lead yours with passion and joy!

Peabody waved her PPC triumphantly. “It’s the Kirk thing, The Enterprise thing. It reminded me I’d hit this name that made me snicker when I was running the van—the Cargo. Here it is. Tony Stark.” “Oh, baby.” McNab blew her a double-handed kiss. “Good call.” “It’s gotta be, right?” Peabody said to McNab. “It’s his style.” “Who the hell is Tony Stark?” Eve demanded. “Iron Man,” Roarke told her. “Superhero, genius, innovative engineer, and billionaire playboy.” “Iron Man? You’re talking about a comic book guy?” “Graphic novel,” Roarke and McNab said together.

The long-term value of an enterprise is not captured by the value of its products and intellectual property but rather by its ability to continuously increase the value it provides to customers — and to create new customers — through innovation.

That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of "free culture"—not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement[2] ), but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture"—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

There is no room at all for independent enterprise under any variety of State Socialism. Prices are to be regulated authoritatively; authority is to fix what is to be produced, and how, and in what quantities. There is to be no speculation, no 'excessive' profit, no loss. There is to be no innovation unless it be decreed by authority. The official is to direct and supervise everything.

It was not for nothing that Adam Smith wrote that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The romantic notion of politics holds that Big Business is synonymous with capitalism and the archenemy of socialism. In fact, Big Business is reliably against most of what must go into any modern definition of capitalism: free trade, free enterprise, free markets, and the impartial rule of law. Big Business reliably seeks to use the state to seek advantages in trade and to crush smaller (and often more innovative) competitors.

There are two rules of thumb architects follow when decomposing systems. First, ensure that adding a new feature tends to change only one service or a component at a time. This reduces interface churn.6 Second, avoid “chatty” or fine-grained communication between services. Chatty services scale poorly and are harder to impersonate for testing purposes.

the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

The creation of agricultural enterprises represents one of the most effective ways to stimulate rural development.

Engage the whole community with a common purpose to build an innovative and sustainable enterprise.

Luck was a luxury, not the basis for a business. Luck had to be a “nice to have,” not a “need to have.

Successful innovation requires commitment, consistency, and collaboration

Finally, goals and objectives for each area need to be set. Everyone who takes on the primary responsibility for a key activity, whether product development or people, or money, must be asked: ‘What can this enterprise expect of you? What should we hold you accountable for? What are you trying to accomplish and by what time?’ But this is elementary management, of course.

What Carnegie had to know personally and what he knew better than anyone else was costs. One could not control a market, although Carnegie was a superb salesman, but one could, one had to, control costs.

I’m a firm a believer in the power of free enterprise to move the world forward. All that Soviet respect for science was no match for the American innovation machine once unleashed. The problem comes when the government is inhibiting innovation with overregulation and short-sighted policy. Trade wars and restrictive immigration regulations will limit America’s ability to attract the best and brightest minds, minds needed for this and every forthcoming Sputnik moment.

as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did, in every part of life, without innovation: that some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill common-wealth's men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country.

Liberty has never come from government,” Woodrow Wilson, one of FDR’s predecessors and another Democrat, said. “The history of liberty is the history of limitation of government’s power, not the increase of it.” Somewhere along the line, the liberal Democrats forgot this and changed their party. It was no longer the party of Thomas Jefferson or Woodrow Wilson. The competitive free enterprise system has given us the greatest standard of living in the world, produced generation after generation of technical wizards who consistently lead the world in invention and innovation, and has provided unlimited opportunities enabling industrious Americans from the most humble of backgrounds to climb to the top of the ladder of success. By 1960, I realized the real enemy wasn’t big business, it was big government.

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty. In fact, as I will argue later, I believe “entrepreneur” should be considered a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth. 3. Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. 5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

With all production, employment, and distribution of output completely under the monopoly control of the State, the fate and fortune of every individual would be at the mercy of the political authority. In addition, these earlier opponents of socialism had cogently argued that with the end of private property and freedom of enterprise, individuals would lose much of the self-interested motivation for industry, innovation, and work effort that exists in a market economy.

For the existing enterprise, whether business or public-service institution, the controlling word in the term ‘entrepreneurial management’ is ‘entrepreneurial’. For the new venture, it is ‘management’. In the existing business, it is the existing that is the main obstacle to entrepreneurship. In the new venture, it is its absence. The new venture has an idea. It may have a product or a service. It may even have sales, and sometimes quite a substantial volume of them. It surely has costs. And it may have revenues and even profits. What it does not have is a ‘business’, a viable, operating, organized ‘present’ in which people know where they are going, what they are supposed to do, and what the results are or should be. But unless a new venture develops into a new business and makes sure of being ‘managed’, it will not survive no matter how brilliant the entrepreneurial idea, how much money it attracts, how good its products, nor even how great the demand for them.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews had no part in the culture of Christian countries, and were too severely persecuted to be able to make contributions to civilization, beyond supplying capital for the building of cathedrals and such enterprises. It was only among the Mohammedans, at that period, that Jews were treated humanely, and were able to pursue philosophy and enlightened speculation. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Mohammedans were more civilized and more humane than the Christians. Christians persecuted Jews, especially at times of religious excitement; the Crusades were associated with appalling pogroms. In Mohammedan countries, on the contrary, Jews at most times were not in any way ill treated. Especially in Moorish Spain, they contributed to learning; Maimonides (1135–1204), who was born at Cordova, is regarded by some as the source of much of Spinoza’s philosophy.Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be under-rated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization—education, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism—the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth.

The philosophical reason for which we are against nationalization and for private enterprise is because we believe that economic progress comes from the inventiveness, ability, determination and the pioneering spirit of extraordinary men and women. If they cannot exercise that spirit here, they will go away to another free enterprise country which will then make more economic progress than we do. We ought, in fact, to be encouraging small firms and small companies, because the extent to which innovation comes through these companies is tremendous.

The key stone of Westem civilization is the sphere of spontaneous action it secures to the individual. There have always been attempts to curb the individuais initiative, but the power of the persecutors and inquisitors has not been absolute. It could not prevent the rise of Greek philosophy and its Roman offshoot or the development of modem science and philosophy. Driven by their inborn genius, pioneers have accomplished their work in spite of ali hostility and opposition. The innovator did not have to wait for invitation or order from anybody. He could step forward of his own accord and defy traditional teachings. In the orbit of ideas the West has by and large always enjoyed the blessings of freedom. Then came the emancipation of the individual in the field of business, an achievement of that new branch of philosophy, economics. A free hand was given to the enterprising man who knew how to enrich his fellows by improving the methods of production. A horn of plenty was poured upon the common men by the capitalistic business principie of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses.

It was thus that in the second half of 1969—amid the static of Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, Vietnam War protests, Charles Manson, the Chicago Eight trial, and Altamont—the culmination was reached for three historic enterprises, each in the making for almost a decade. NASA was able to send a man to the moon. Engineers in Silicon Valley were able to devise a way to put a programmable computer on a chip called a microprocessor. And ARPA created a network that could connect distant computers. Only the first of these (perhaps the least historically significant of them?) made headlines. THE

In his revolutionary work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1970, Paulo Freire describes what is still the dominant model of teaching today. In this model, students are viewed as empty “bank accounts” to be filled with knowledge by teachers — not as participants who have a say in what and how they learn. This model is not designed to enable students to learn — especially not to learn to think for themselves — but rather to control the learning process, students’ access to information, and their ability to critically analyze it. In this way, the education system perpetuates existing social structures and power hierarchies.

In reality, however, this type of command and control has not been fashionable in military circles since 1806 when the Prussian Army, a classic plan-driven organization, was decisively defeated by Napoleon’s decentralized, highly motivated forces. Napoleon used a style of war known as maneuver warfare to defeat larger, better-trained armies. In maneuver warfare, the goal is to minimize the need for actual fighting by disrupting your enemy’s ability to act cohesively through the use of shock and surprise. A key element in maneuver warfare is being able to learn, make decisions, and act faster than your enemy — the same capability that allows startups to disrupt enterprises.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews had no part in the culture of Christian countries, and were too severely persecuted to be able to make contributions to civilization, beyond supplying capital for the building of cathedrals and such enterprises. It was only among the Mohammedans, at that period, that Jews were treated humanely, and were able to pursue philosophy and enlightened speculation. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Mohammedans were more civilized and more humane than the Christians. Christians persecuted Jews, especially at times of religious excitement; the Crusades were associated with appalling pogroms. In Mohammedan countries, on the contrary, Jews at most times were not in any way ill treated. Especially in Moorish Spain, they contributed to learning; Maimonides (1135–1204), who was born at Cordova, is regarded by some as the source of much of Spinoza’s philosophy. (..) Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be under-rated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization—education, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism—the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth.

free to pursue new options even if such options imply loss of profits for selected industries. The same is clearly true in pharmaceutical research, in the pursuit of alternatives to the internal-combustion engine, and in many other technological frontiers. I do not think that the development of new technologies should be placed in the control of old technologies; the temptation to suppress the competition is too great. If we Americans live in a free-enterprise society, let us see substantial independent enterprise in all of the technologies upon which our future may depend. If organizations devoted to technological innovation and its boundaries of acceptability are not challenging (and perhaps even offending) at least some powerful groups, they are not accomplishing their purpose.

Pull approaches differ significantly from push approaches in terms of how they organize and manage resources. Push approaches are typified by "programs" - tightly scripted specifications of activities designed to be invoked by known parties in pre-determined contexts. Of course, we don't mean that all push approaches are software programs - we are using this as a broader metaphor to describe one way of organizing activities and resources. Think of thick process manuals in most enterprises or standardized curricula in most primary and secondary educational institutions, not to mention the programming of network television, and you will see that institutions heavily rely on programs of many types to deliver resources in pre-determined contexts. Pull approaches, in contrast, tend to be implemented on "platforms" designed to flexibly accommodate diverse providers and consumers of resources. These platforms are much more open-ended and designed to evolve based on the learning and changing needs of the participants. Once again, we do not mean to use platforms in the literal sense of a tangible foundation, but in a broader, metaphorical sense to describe frameworks for orchestrating a set of resources that can be configured quickly and easily to serve a broad range of needs. Think of Expedia's travel service or the emergency ward of a hospital and you will see the contrast with the hard-wired push programs.

values of commons-based sharing and of private enterprise often conflict, most notably over the extent to which innovations should be patent-protected. The commons crowd had its roots in the hacker ethic that emanated from the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club and the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Wozniak was an exemplar. He went to Homebrew meetings to show off the computer circuit he built, and he handed out freely the schematics so that others could use and improve it. But his neighborhood pal Steve Jobs, who began accompanying him to the meetings, convinced him that they should quit sharing the invention and instead build and sell it. Thus Apple was born, and for the subsequent forty years it has been at the forefront of aggressively patenting and profiting from its innovations. The instincts of both Steves were useful in creating the digital age. Innovation is most vibrant in the realms where open-source systems compete with proprietary ones. Sometimes people advocate one of these modes of production over the others based on ideological sentiments. They prefer a greater government role, or exalt private enterprise, or romanticize peer sharing. In the 2012 election, President Barack Obama stirred up controversy by saying to people who owned businesses, “You didn’t build that.” His critics saw it as a denigration of the role of private enterprise. Obama’s point was that any business benefits from government and peer-based community support: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.

Let’s begin with this notion that society, not entrepreneurs, is primarily responsible for the success of an enterprise. What is the evidence for that? Actually there is very little. Consider the great inventions and innovations of the nineteenth century that made possible the Industrial Revolution and the rising standard of living that propelled America into the front ranks of the world by the mid-twentieth century. Who built the telegraph, and the great shipping lines, and the railroads, and the airplanes? Who produced the tractors and the machinery that made America the manufacturing capital of the world? Who built and then made available home appliances like the vacuum cleaner, the automatic dishwasher, and the microwave oven? More recent, who built the personal computer, the iPhone, and the software and search engines that power the electronic revolution? Entrepreneurs, that’s who. Government played a role, but that role was extremely modest. In the nineteenth century, the government did little more than grant licenses to companies to operate on the high seas or to go ahead and build railroads. As is often the case when there are government favors to be had, such licenses and contracts were attended with the usual lobbying, cajoling, and corruption. In the twentieth century, the government refused to help the Wright brothers because it had its own cockamamie idea about how airplanes should be built; the Wright brothers, on their own, actually went ahead and built one that could fly, and the government was so angry that for a long time it simply ignored this stunning new invention.

Entrenched myth: Successful leaders in a turbulent world are bold, risk-seeking visionaries. Contrary finding: The best leaders we studied did not have a visionary ability to predict the future. They observed what worked, figured out why it worked, and built upon proven foundations. They were not more risk taking, more bold, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons. They were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid. Entrenched myth: Innovation distinguishes 10X companies in a fast-moving, uncertain, and chaotic world. Contrary finding: To our surprise, no. Yes, the 10X cases innovated, a lot. But the evidence does not support the premise that 10X companies will necessarily be more innovative than their less successful comparisons; and in some surprise cases, the 10X cases were less innovative. Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card we expected; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline. Entrenched myth: A threat-filled world favors the speedy; you’re either the quick or the dead. Contrary finding: The idea that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action”—and that we should embrace an overall ethos of “Fast! Fast! Fast!”—is a good way to get killed. 10X leaders figure out when to go fast, and when not to. Entrenched myth: Radical change on the outside requires radical change on the inside. Contrary finding: The 10X cases changed less in reaction to their changing world than the comparison cases. Just because your environment is rocked by dramatic change does not mean that you should inflict radical change upon yourself. Entrenched myth: Great enterprises with 10X success have a lot more good luck. Contrary finding: The 10X companies did not generally have more luck than the comparisons. Both sets had luck—lots of luck, both good and bad—in comparable amounts. The critical question is not whether you’ll have luck, but what you do with the luck that you get.

It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I’d tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. I’d like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bull’s-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bull’s-eye. It’s not one man’s opinion; it’s a law of nature. I’d like to remind them that America isn’t the entrepreneurial Shangri-La people think. Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no, sorry, no. And it’s always been this way. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They’ve always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. A Harvard Business School study recently ranked all the countries of the world in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit. America ranked behind Peru. And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop. Luck plays a big role. Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñāna, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God. Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them: Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

America is founded on the understanding that wealth can be created through innovation and enterprise. Through the system of technological capitalism, we can go from ten marbles to twenty marbles without taking anyone’s marbles.

Innovation is discovery at the intersection of what’s desirable, viable, and feasible.

Yoga just ain’t that type of enterprise. It is ten thousand rain droplets rather than one holy spring. The postures are being innovated. The ideas reorganized, reinterpreted, and reimagined. And there is a long, hearty history where long individuals have appointed themselves all-knowing gurus and deliberately twisted facts to their own satisfaction and cosmology. So throw your ideas of authenticity out the window.

The right culture also unlocks internal talent, because you don’t add innovation to a company—you get out of its way. An executive once told me “We can’t copy Netflix because we don’t have the people.” My response was “Where do you think they used to work? We hired them from you and got out of their way…

faster. Now, when new technology is brought in, your coworkers have a different calculus. If they can produce 20 percent more per employee, why not decrease the workweek to twenty-eight hours? (For all sectors, legislation dictates the required workweek cannot exceed thirty-five hours.)13 There is still market competition, and firms still fail, but the grow-or-die imperative doesn’t apply when your enterprise’s goal is no longer to maximize total profits but rather to maximize profit-per-worker. And instead of a race to the bottom, there’s pressure to make sure janitorial and other “dirty jobs” are well compensated. In time, many of these tasks will be automated. People used to fear that machines would bring about mass unemployment, but now you and most others look forward to the social impact of technological innovations.14

Continual, systemic alignment assessments are needed both to identify and amplify small pockets of innovation and to tune up the whole enterprise.

When we become an autonomous organization, we will be one of the largest unadulterated digital security organizations on the planet,” he told the annual Intel Security Focus meeting in Las Vegas. “Not only will we be one of the greatest, however, we will not rest until we achieve our goal of being the best,” said Young. This is the main focus since Intel reported on agreements to deactivate its security business as a free organization in association with the venture company TPG, five years after the acquisition of McAfee. Young focused on his vision of the new company, his roadmap to achieve that, the need for rapid innovation and the importance of collaboration between industries. “One of the things I love about this conference is that we all come together to find ways to win, to work together,” he said. First, Young highlighted the publication of the book The Second Economy: the race for trust, treasure and time in the war of cybersecurity. The main objective of the book is to help the information security officers (CISO) to communicate the battles that everyone faces in front of others in the c-suite. “So we can recruit them into our fight, we need to recruit others on our journey if we want to be successful,” he said. Challenging assumptions The book is also aimed at encouraging information security professionals to challenge their own assumptions. “I plan to send two copies of this book to the winner of the US presidential election, because cybersecurity is going to be one of the most important issues they could face,” said Young. “The book is about giving more people a vision of the dynamism of what we face in cybersecurity, which is why we have to continually challenge our assumptions,” he said. “That’s why we challenge our assumptions in the book, as well as our assumptions about what we do every day.” Young said Intel Security had asked thousands of customers to challenge the company’s assumptions in the last 18 months so that it could improve. “This week, we are going to bring many of those comments to life in delivering a lot of innovation throughout our portfolio,” he said. Then, Young used a video to underscore the message that the McAfee brand is based on the belief that there is power to work together, and that no person, product or organization can provide total security. By allowing protection, detection and correction to work together, the company believes it can react to cyber threats more quickly. By linking products from different suppliers to work together, the company believes that network security improves. By bringing together companies to share intelligence on threats, you can find better ways to protect each other. The company said that cyber crime is the biggest challenge of the digital era, and this can only be overcome by working together. Revealed a new slogan: “Together is power”. The video also revealed the logo of the new independent company, which Young called a symbol of its new beginning and a visual representation of what is essential to the company’s strategy. “The shield means defense, and the two intertwined components are a symbol of the union that we are in the industry,” he said. “The color red is a callback to our legacy in the industry.” Three main reasons for independence According to Young, there are three main reasons behind the decision to become an independent company. First of all, it should focus entirely on enterprise-level cybersecurity, solve customers ‘cybersecurity problems and address clients’ cybersecurity challenges. The second is innovation. “Because we are committed and dedicated to cybersecurity only at the company level, our innovation is focused on that,” said Young. Third is growth. “Our industry is moving faster than any other IT sub-segment, we have t

I see this book as a simultaneous hat tip and counterpoint to some of the great success and innovation literature out there (check out shanesnow.com/ booklist for my recommendations). It’s a re-analysis and first codification of the ways rapid success has happened throughout history. The step-by-step advice that made an ancient Greek hero rapidly prosperous will be entirely different from what makes a 21st-century businesswoman successful, just as the exact methods an Internet startup uses to grow today will be irrelevant in five years. But the patterns of lateral thinking (smartcuts) behind each of their success stories can be harnessed by anyone who seeks an edge—at work, at the gym, in the arts or education, from social enterprise to personal development, from big companies to small startups.

Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning economist, claims in his book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change that one of the virtues of capitalism is its ability to provide “the experience of mental stimulation, the challenge of new problems to solve, the chance to try the new, and the excitement of venturing into the unknown.”9 That is indeed a possibility under capitalism. But those subject to performance metrics are forced to focus their efforts on limited goals, imposed by others, who may not understand the work that they do. For the workers under scrutiny, mental stimulation is dulled, they decide neither the problems to be solved nor how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. In short, the entrepreneurial element of human nature—which extends beyond the owners of enterprises—may be stifled by metric fixation.10

Giving people pride in their work rather than trying to motivate them with carrots and sticks is an essential element of a high-performance culture.

The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things. Peter Drucker

As discussed in Chapter 2, data gathered from A/B tests by Ronny Kohavi, who directed Amazon’s Data Mining and Personalization group before joining Microsoft as General Manager of its Experimentation Platform, reveal that 60%–90% of ideas do not improve the metric they were intended to improve. Thus if we’re not running experiments to test the value of new ideas before completely developing them, the chances are that about 2/3 of the work we are doing is of either zero or negative value to our customers — and certainly of negative value to our organization, since this work costs us in three ways. In addition to the cost of developing the features, there is an opportunity cost associated with more valuable work we could have done instead, and the cost of the new complexity they add to our systems (which manifests itself as the cost of maintaining the code, a drag on the rate at which we can develop new functionality, and often, reduced operational stability and performance).

People with a fixed mindset fear failure as they believe it makes their innate limitations visible to others, whereas those with a growth mindset are less risk averse by seeing failure as an opportunity to learn and develop new skills.

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. Friedrich Nietzsche

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries, Crown Business, September 12, 2011 The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbably, Second Edition, by Nassim Nicolas Taleb, Random House, May 11, 2010 Footnotes 1 The Black Swan, Second Edition, by Nassim Nicolas Taleb, Random House, May 11, 2010

David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.

Whether people realize it or not, “classic” American conservatism—with its emphasis on small government, balanced budgets, free trade, and the innovative firepower of the free enterprise system—has become an anachronism since the rise of Donald Trump as a political force. As he emerged as the leader of the “conservative” party, he advocated enormous increases in government spending, producing huge budget deficits; promised trade protectionism; and worked to close borders to immigrants. What conservatism means today has, in a sense, gone back to the future. William Jennings Bryan—a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Democrat—would be happier than either Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan with the sort of agenda now put forward by the Republican Party.

In framing silence as an unethical choice, Dalio is taking a more extreme stance than I have adopted. But it's worth reflecting on this idea, which to me implies that you owe your colleagues the expression of your opinion or ideas; in a sense, those ideas belong to the collective enterprise, and you therefore don't have the right to hoard them.

The great American innovation in congregation is to turn it into a consumer enterprise. We Americans have developed a culture of acquisition, an economy that is dependent on wanting more, requiring more. We have a huge advertising industry designed to stir up appetites we didn't even know we had. We are insatiable. It didn't take long for some of our Christian brothers and sisters to develop consumer congregations. If we have a nation of consumers, obviously the quickest and most effective way to get them into our congregations is to identify what they want and offer it to them, satisfy their fantasies, promise them the moon, recast the gospel in consumer terms: entertainment, satisfaction, excitement, adventure, problem-solving, whatever. This is the language we Americans grow up on, the language we understand. We are the world's champion consumers, so why shouldn't we have state-of-the-art consumer churches? Given the conditions prevailing in our culture, this is the best and most effective way that has ever been devised for gathering large and prosperous congregations. Americans lead the world in showing how to do it. There is only one thing wrong: this is not the way in which God brings us into conformity with the life of Jesus and sets us on the way of Jesus' salvation. This is not the way in which we become less and Jesus becomes more. This is not the way in which our sacrificed lives become available to others in justice and service. The cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, "deny yourself" congregation. A consumer church is an antichrist church. We can't gather a God-fearing, God-worshiping congregation by cultivating a consumer-pleasing, commodity-oriented congregation. When we do, the wheels start falling off the wagon. And they are falling off the wagon. We can't suppress the Jesus way in order to sell the Jesus truth. The Jesus way and the Jesus truth must be congruent. Only when the Jesus way is organically joined with the Jesus truth do we get the Jesus life.

To achieve this, we rely on people being able to make local decisions that are sound at a strategic level — which, in turn, relies critically on the flow of information, including feedback loops.

But Anita Roddick had a different take on that. In 1976, before the words to say it had been found, she set out to create a business that was socially and environmentally regenerative by design. Opening The Body Shop in the British seaside town of Brighton, she sold natural plant-based cosmetics (never tested on animals) in refillable bottles and recycled boxes (why throw away when you can use again?) while paying a fair price to the communities worldwide that supplied cocoa butter, brazil nut oil and dried herbs. As production expanded, the business began to recycle its wastewater for using in its products and was an early investor in wind power. Meanwhile, company profits went to The Body Shop Foundation, which gave them to social and environmental causes. In all, a pretty generous enterprise. Roddick’s motivation? ‘I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community,’ she later explained. ‘If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?’47 Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s ‘living purpose’—turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business. Roddick proved that business can be far more than that, by embedding benevolent values and a regenerative intent at the company’s birth. ‘We dedicated the Articles of Association and Memoranda—which in England is the legal definition of the purpose of your company—to human rights advocacy and social and environmental change,’ she explained in 2005, ‘so everything the company did had that as its canopy.’48 Today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the same idea: that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world. And the growing family of enterprise structures that are intentionally distributive by design—including cooperatives, not-for-profits, community interest companies, and benefit corporations—can be regenerative by design too.49 By explicitly making a regenerative commitment in their corporate by-laws and enshrining it in their governance, they can safeguard a ‘living purpose’ through times of leadership change and protect it from mission creep. Indeed the most profound act of corporate responsibility for any company today is to rewrite its corporate by-laws, or articles of association, in order to redefine itself with a living purpose, rooted in regenerative and distributive design, and then to live and work by it.

But in many ways the most important innovations in any enterprise are the changes we make in how we prepare human beings to perform.

Degradation of work. Compelling the people in an organization to focus their efforts on the narrow range of what gets measured leads to a degradation of the experience of work. Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning economist, claims in his book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change that one of the virtues of capitalism is its ability to provide “the experience of mental stimulation, the challenge of new problems to solve, the chance to try the new, and the excitement of venturing into the unknown.”9 That is indeed a possibility under capitalism. But those subject to performance metrics are forced to focus their efforts on limited goals, imposed by others, who may not understand the work that they do. For the workers under scrutiny, mental stimulation is dulled, they decide neither the problems to be solved nor how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. In short, the entrepreneurial element of human nature—which extends beyond the owners of enterprises—may be stifled by metric fixation.10 One result is to motivate those with greater initiative and enterprise to move out of mainstream, large-scale organizations where the culture of accountable performance prevails. Teachers move out of public schools to private schools and charter schools. Engineers move out of large corporations to boutique firms. Enterprising government employees become consultants. There is a healthy element in this. But surely the large-scale organizations of our society are the poorer for driving out those most likely to innovate and initiate. The more that work becomes a matter of filling in the boxes by which performance is to be measured and rewarded, the more it will repel those who think outside the box.

We should explore and experiment with radical process changes — known as kaikaku in Lean terminology — in the same way we explore potential new business models. That is, we should try them out with a relatively small, cross-functional part of the organization, with people that fall in the “innovator” category. These people must be interested in the proposed process experiments and have the necessary skills to run them.

In a survey of 161 global business decision makers shown in Figure 2-6, only 24% of respondents reported using an economic model to make investment decisions in products and services. Astonishingly, 13% admitted that the most highly paid person’s opinion (known as the HiPPO method) is the primary deciding factor.15 47% reported using the only slightly less embarrassing method of decision by committee.

Giving people pride in their work rather than trying to motivate them with carrots and sticks is an essential element of a high-performance culture.4

organization. To achieve this, we rely on people being able to make local decisions that are sound at a strategic level — which, in turn, relies critically on the flow of information, including feedback loops.

The key to creating a lean enterprise is to enable those doing the work to solve their customers’ problems in a way that is aligned with the strategy of the wider

Marketing is all about assurance.

By embracing open talent, enterprises can connect with a vast network of people and organizations, generating innovative solutions.

While the lean approach has found great favor in both new and old enterprises, companies fail when they devote all their resources to a single product. As market saturation occurs faster all the time, the capacity to generate new products has become more important than the specialized expertise needed to create just one, no matter how enthusiastically customers embrace it. Focusing every resource on one product, even after it’s clear customers have tired of it, leads to trapped value within the enterprise, where talented developers and smart entrepreneurs miss out on the chance to innovate with the next wave of new technologies. If the market has simply moved on and is waiting for the next innovation, investing core resources in the repeated iterations and course corrections the lean methodology demands

no plan survives contact with the enemy,

Mission Command embraces a conception of leadership which unsentimentally places human beings at its center. It crucially depends on factors which do not appear on the balance sheet of an organization: the willingness of people to accept responsibility; the readiness of their superiors to back up their decisions; the tolerance of mistakes made in good faith. Designed for an external environment which is unpredictable and hostile, it builds on an internal environment which is predictable and supportive. At its heart is a network of trust binding people together up, down, and across a hierarchy. Achieving and maintaining that requires constant work.15

In actual practice this distinction makes no sense whatever. An enterprise, whether a business or any other institution, that does not innovate and does not engage in entrepreneurship will not survive long.

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.

Discussions of entrepreneurship tend to focus on the personalities and attitudes of top management people, and especially of the chief executive. 4 Of course, any top management can damage and stifle entrepreneurship within its company. It’s easy enough. All it takes is to say ‘No’ to every new idea and to keep on saying it for a few years – and then make sure that those who came up with the new ideas never get a reward or a promotion and become ex-employees fairly swiftly. It is far less certain, however, that top management personalities and attitudes can by themselves – without the proper policies and practices – create an entrepreneurial business, which is what most of the books on entrepreneurship assert, at least by implication. In the few short-lived cases I know of, the companies were built and still run by the founder. Even then, when it gets to be successful the company soon ceases to be entrepreneurial unless it adopts the policies and practices of entrepreneurial management. The reason why top management personalities and attitudes do not suffice in any but the very young or very small business is, of course, that even a medium-sized enterprise is a pretty large organization. It requires a good many people who know what they are supposed to do, want to do it, are motivated towards doing it, and are supplied with both the tools and continuous reaffirmation. Otherwise there is only lip service; entrepreneurship soon becomes confined to the CEO’s speeches.

However, Americans have created a system in which wealth is created with hard work, innovation, talent and enterprise. People who display these qualities move up in life.

Specifically, systematic innovation means monitoring seven sources for innovative opportunity. The first four sources lie within the enterprise, whether business or public-service institution, or within an industry or service sector. They are therefore visible primarily to people within that industry or service sector. They are basically symptoms. But they are highly reliable indicators of changes that have already happened or can be made to happen with little effort. These four source areas are: • The unexpected – the unexpected success, the unexpected failure, the unexpected outside event; • The incongruity – between reality as it actually is and reality as it is assumed to be or as it ‘ought to be’; • Innovation based on process need; • Changes in industry structure or market structure that catch everyone unawares. The second set of sources for innovative opportunity, a set of three, involves changes outside the enterprise or industry: • Demographics (population changes); • Changes in perception, mood, and meaning; • New knowledge, both scientific and nonscientific.

The elements of a suitable product-centric paradigm that works at scale have all emerged in the last 10 years, but they have not yet been connected and presented in a systematic way.

The key activities are not to be found in books. They emerge from analysis of the specific enterprise. Two enterprises that to an outsider appear to be in an identical line of business may well end up defining their key activities quite differently. One, for instance, may put production in the centre; the other, customer service. Only two key activities are always present in any organization: there is always the management of people and there is always the management of money. The rest has to be determined by the people within looking at the enterprise and at their own jobs, values, and goals.

Don’t slow down delivery. Decide, when needed, at the right level. Do it with the right people. Go see for yourself. Only do it if it adds value. Trust and verify.

Africa had free markets and a thriving entrepreneurial culture and tradition centuries before these became the animating ideas of the United States or Western Europe. Timbuktu, the legendary city in northern Mali, was a famous trading post and marketplace as far back as the twelfth century, as vital to the commerce of North and West Africa as ports on the Mediterranean were to Europe and the Levant. In Africa Unchained, George Ayittey offers myriad examples of industrial activity in precolonial Africa, from the indigo-dye cloth trade of fourteenth-century Kano, Nigeria, to the flourishing glass industry of precolonial Benin to the palm oil businesses of southern Nigeria to the Kente cotton trade of the Asante of Ghana in the 1800s: “Profit was never an alien concept to Africa. Throughout its history there have been numerous entrepreneurs. The aim of traders and numerous brokers or middlemen was profit and wealth.”2 The tragedy is what happened next. These skills and traditions were destroyed, damaged, eroded or forced underground, first during centuries of slave wars and colonialism and, later, through decades of corrupt postindependence rule, usually in service to foreign ideologies of socialism or communism. No postcolonial leader in Africa who fought for independence has ever adequately explained why liberation from colonial rule necessarily meant following the ideas and philosophies of Karl Marx, a gray-bearded nineteenth-century German academic who worked out of the British Library and never set foot in Africa. At the same time, neither should we have ever allowed ourselves to become beholden to paternalistic aid organizations that were sending their representatives to build our wells and plant our food for us. Nor, for that matter, should we have relied on the bureaucrats of the Western world telling us how to be proper capitalists or—as is happening now—to Party officials in Beijing telling us what they want in exchange for this or that project. It was this outside influence—starting with colonialism but later from our own terrible and corrupt policies and leaderships—that the stereotype of the lazy, helpless, unimaginative and dependent African developed. The point is that we Africans have to take charge of our own destiny, and to do this we can call on our own unique culture and traditions of innovation, free enterprise and free trade. We are a continent of entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry.

At the heart of that activity is innovation: the effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise’s economic or social potential.

The state is painted largely as a source of problematic authority, while private enterprise is given a free pass; democracy, fuzzily defined, is attained through “sharing,” “collaboration,” “innovation,” and “disruption.

Even Peter Senge, consultant for many high profile corporations and the developer of the “learning organization” states, “The Army’s After Action Review (AAR) is arguably one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet devised.” However, Senge continues to say, “Yet, most every corporate effort to graft this truly innovative practice into their culture has failed because, again and again, people reduce the living practice of the AAR’s to a sterile technique.”39

Businesses, industries and corporations will face continuous Darwinian pressures and as such, the philosophy of “always in beta” (always evolving) will become more prevalent. This suggests that the global number of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs (enterprising company managers) will increase. Small and medium-sized enterprises will have the advantages of speed and the agility needed to deal with disruption and innovation.

In technology, take care not to underestimate or get caught out by the nonlinear pace of change. In culture, evaluate social acceptability and keep testing its boundaries without crossing the “creepy line.” With regulation, innovate because of it or in spite of it, treating it as a potential source of opportunity, not just an obstacle.

There is no rule that says ‘A chief executive has to be in charge of this or that.’ Of course a chief executive is the court of last resort and has ultimate accountability. And the chief executive also has to make sure of getting the information necessary to discharge this ultimate accountability. The chief executive’s own work, however, depends on what the enterprise requires and on who the individual is. As long as the CEO’s work programme consists of key activities, he or she does a CEO’s job. But the CEO also is responsible for making sure that all the other key activities are adequately covered.

Product people become judged on their ability to create comprehensive specification documents and well-crafted business cases, not on whether the products and features they come up with deliver value to users.

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best. W. Edwards Deming

The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things. Peter Drucker Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world…[it is] a result, not a strategy…Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.1 Jack Welch

This process of wealth creation is offensive to levelers and planners because it yields mountains of new wealth in ways that could not possibly be planned. But unpredictability is fundamental to free human enterprise. It defies every econometric model and socialist scheme. It makes no sense to most professors, who attain their positions by the systematic acquisition of credentials pleasing to the establishment above them. By definition, innovations cannot be planned. Leading entrepreneurs—from Sam Walton to Mike Milken to Larry Page to Bill Gates— did not ascend a hierarchy; they created a new one. They did not climb to the top of anything. They were pushed to the top by their own success. They did not capture the pinnacle; they became it.

Such programs fail to recognize that turning innovation or change into an event rather than part of our daily work can never produce significant or lasting results.

Look for obstacles constantly and treat them as opportunities to experiment and learn.

features often fail to deliver the expected value).

Enterprises that use design thinking and user experience (UX) design strategically to delight customers at each step of their interaction with the organization have thrived: research shows companies which apply UX design in this way experience faster growth and higher revenues.2

...as we proceed to higher and higher levels of expertise, and as the stakes get higher and higher, the agonies of excellence reappear in new and frightening ways. A tiny minority gets through to the top, to memorable excellence or profound understanding. The rest of us stop at stages along the way, perhaps for a temporary rest, perhaps for a period of reassessment. But once we stop, we are unlikely to start up again. Security is suddenly far sweeter than enterprise. The sufferings of the ascent, so long endured by insuppressible aspiration, suddenly seem pointless.

Oracle 12c Enterprise or Standard Edition – building on Oracle’s unique ability to deliver Grid Computing, 12c gives Oracle customers the agility to respond faster to changing business conditions, gain competitive advantage through technology innovation, and reduce costs.

Guardiola’s natural talent for innovation is a perfect fit with the German spirit of enterprise.

Astonishingly, 13% admitted that the most highly paid person’s opinion (known as the HiPPO method) is the primary deciding factor.15 47% reported using the only slightly less embarrassing method of decision by committee.

In most enterprises, around 30%–50% of the total time to market is spent on activity which provides almost zero value in terms of mitigating the risks of our investments. This