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.

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

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

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

Successful innovation requires commitment, consistency, and collaboration

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like all best supporting actors, the state may also step centre stage, taking entrepreneurial risks where the market and commons can’t or won’t reach. The extraordinary success of tech companies such as Apple is sometimes held up as evidence of the market’s dynamism. But Mariana Mazzucato, an expert in the economics of government-led innovation, points out that the basic research behind every innovation that makes a smart phone ‘smart’—GPS, microchips, touchscreens and the Internet itself—was funded by the US government. The state, not the market, turns out to have been the innovating, risk-taking partner, not ‘crowding out’ but ‘dynamising in’ private enterprise—and this trend holds across other high-tech industries too, such as pharmaceuticals and biotech.42 In the words of Ha-Joon Chang, ‘If we remain blinded by the free market ideology that tells us only winner-picking by the private sector can succeed, we will end up ignoring a huge range of possibilities for economic development through public leadership or public-private joint efforts.

One promising way of redefining the meaning of ‘economist’ is to look to those who have gone beyond new economic thinking to new economic doing: the innovators who are evolving the economy one experiment at a time. Their impact is already reflected in the take-off of new business models, in the proven dynamism of the collaborative commons, in the vast potential of digital currencies and in the inspiring possibilities of regenerative design. As Donella Meadows made clear, the power of self-organisation—the ability of a system to add, change and evolve its own structure—is a high leverage point for whole system change. And that unleashes a revolutionary thought: it makes economists of us all. If economies change by evolving, then every experiment—be it a new enterprise model, complementary currency or open-source collaboration —helps to diversify, select and amplify a new economic future.

One specific conflict that often arises between donors and investors is how to treat proprietary information. Donors often seek to place the intellectual property an enterprise creates (best practices, challenges, and process innovations, for example) into the public domain as quickly as possible. Focusing on social impact, they want the enterprise to build bridges to entry for other social entrepreneurs to replicate the model widely. In contrast, most private investors want to maximize their financial return by building barriers that prevent others from adopting a new business model or technology. Neither approach maximizes blended value. Instead, impact investors need to find new ways to integrate the imperative to replicate models for maximum social impact with the need to generate profits and achieve investment exits.

Culture is the multigenerational hard-drive of memory, change, and innovation. Culture transforms a record of the past into a prediction of the future; it transforms memory into tradition — into rules of how to proceed. And culture is profoundly social. It exists not just in one mind, but binds together mobs of minds in a common enterprise.

executives scan these seven situations for opportunities: • an unexpected success or failure in their own enterprise, in a competing enterprise, or in the industry; • a gap between what is and what could be in a market, process, product, or service (for example, in the nineteenth century, the paper industry concentrated on the 10 percent of each tree that became wood pulp and totally neglected the possibilities in the remaining 90 percent, which became waste); • innovation in a process, product, or service, whether inside or outside the enterprise or its industry; • changes in industry structure and market structure; • demographics; • changes in mind-set, values, perception, mood, or meaning; and • new knowledge or a new technology.

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.

Vision mission: What was the original market or technology insight that led you to create this company? Customers: Who do you envision buying this product or service? Who will use it? Problem statement: What’s the problem you think you can solve for your potential customers? Use cases: What are the specific ways people will use this product or service to solve their problem? Product/solution: Give a detailed explanation of the technology behind the solution—what does it do now, and what else is it capable of doing? Ecosystem: In many cases there are other companies involved in solving the problem or adding additional value. These companies form an ecosystem around the problem and solution. What are all the companies and where in the ecosystem are the control points where one company has leverage? Competition: Who else is trying to solve this problem—or, if no one else sees the problem yet, who might jump in to compete with you to solve the problem once you identify it? Business model: How will your product or service change business for your customers? Will it increase their return on investment or reduce costs in a significant way? Or does it allow them to do something that couldn’t have been done with prior technology, creating huge value? Sales and go-to-market: Enterprise companies should articulate how the product or solution will make its way to the market. Through a sales force? Through distribution partners? Both? For a consumer company, how will users find out about your solution? From app stores? Search? Viral adoption? Growth hacking techniques? Advertising? PR? Organization: How is the company organized? Who are the major influencers on the company? How are decisions made? What kind of culture will work? Funding strategy: What’s the next funding event? A private financing? An IPO? How much runway does the company have before it needs more money and what kind of funding is in place to execute against the category strategy?

Marketing is all about assurance.

The national security state as technology enterprise. First, America’s capacity for transformative innovation derives not merely from the entrepreneurship of its private sector, or simply from the state as such, but from the national security state—a particular cluster of federal agencies that collaborate closely with private actors in pursuit of security-related objectives.

I seek to illuminate what has hitherto been obscured as well as downplayed in the scholarly literature. In my argument, in the absence of the NSS and the permanent defense preparedness around which it has formed, there would be little to distinguish U.S. innovation from that found in most other advanced democracies. Whether one should applaud or regret such an outcome is not germane to my argument. Certainly, it is conceivable that once established, a transformative innovation capacity could be unmoored from its originating NSS institutions and its geopolitical drivers. But we must also factor in particularities of the domestic institutional setting, which make that outcome most unlikely—namely, the domestic strength of antistatism.

in order to attract private actors to carry through their innovation projects and policies, various components of the NSS have to create, and periodically update, a whole system of incentives and organizational arrangements—ranging from the funding and design of technology development to intellectual property and procurement reforms. Over time, this motivating process draws the NSS further and further into promoting commercial technology from which both sectors can draw benefit. But throughout this process of give and take, the NSS continues to set the goals, make the rules (for example, by setting performance standards), and define the problem sets for industry and university researchers to tackle. The outcome is what I characterize as a system of governed interdependence—neither “statist” nor “free-market” in its approach to inducing transformative innovation.

although the security imperative and the NSS to which it gives rise provide the driving force behind transformative technology development, governed interdependence is the obverse of statism (or top-down direction of the economy); it conceptualizes the collaborative and negotiated character of public-private sector relations as NSS components seek to achieve their goals (an example being the increasing emphasis that defense programs place on developing products and services that serve both military and commercial markets). I emphasize that the governed interdependence concept applies to situations in which a government body works with or through private actors and entities to achieve its own objectives, but at the same time maintains control over the goals to be pursued and the rules of participation. This does not mean that outcomes will always yield the results desired or that there will not be spectacular failures.

Workers in the new economy cannot be content with just problem solving and perfecting the known. They must be enterprising and innovative, always seeking new ways of doing the job, to create the extra value, the extra edge.

Komori notes that a good enterprise is able to adapt to external changes, but “the best enterprise is a company that creates change on its own.

Evolving a widely reused resource also requires coordination because changes must be compatible with all existing systems or users. Such coordination can slow down innovation... Some digital companies have even begun to explicitly favor duplication because their business environment rewards economies of speed.

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

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.

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.

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

Josh Chu is a seasoned technology executive with a rich background in software engineering, data science, and team leadership. Holding a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, he has consistently thrived in roles demanding strong technical leadership. Josh boasts a remarkable track record of expanding teams, securing funding, and overseeing extensive data projects. His proficiency extends across enterprise software, SaaS, engineering, and data science, rendering him a prime candidate for a technical leadership position. Josh is a dynamic leader known for propelling innovation and fostering growth, setting the stage for a successful future.

If you want to innovate, to change an enterprise of society, it takes people willing to do what is not expected.

In the mid-2000s, the IEA estimated that OPEC’s share of total world oil supply would rise from 38 percent in 2000 to 48 percent by 2020.5 In 2019, OPEC’s share of total world oil supply had fallen to under 30 percent, threatening its entire enterprise of influencing world oil prices. To regain sufficient market power, especially in light of the changes in the elasticity of both oil supply and demand, it needed to add a major non-OPEC producer to its ranks—hence its changed attitude about cooperation with Russia. Moscow is now a necessity for OPEC, and for Saudi Arabia, if it is going to able to salvage any semblance of influence over the price of oil.

Timely execution is very demanding. The process of bringing an innovation to market is complex and harbors many unknowns. An innovation must often successfully defeat a thousand enemies—inside as well as outside of the enterprise—to become a reality. Once the innovation is in the market, continued effective execution is critical. The first company to move with the strongest innovation often reaps the greatest reward. But to retain the advantage, the innovator must prevail with the second innovation as well as with the third. Failure to accomplish this means risking all.

As a leading MLM software company in New York, we specialize in delivering cutting-edge solutions tailored to the unique needs of multi-level marketing businesses. Our team of experienced MLM software developers in New York is dedicated to crafting innovative and scalable software that empowers businesses to streamline their operations, manage networks efficiently, and drive growth. With a deep understanding of the industry, our MLM software development company in New York ensures that every solution we create is robust, secure, and adaptable to the ever-evolving demands of the MLM landscape. Whether you're a start-up looking for a customizable platform or an established enterprise seeking advanced features, our MLM software in New York is designed to meet all your requirements. Our commitment to excellence and customer satisfaction sets us apart. We collaborate closely with our clients to ensure the software aligns with their business goals, enabling them to maximize efficiency, enhance network communication, and foster success. As a trusted MLM software company in New York, we pride ourselves on delivering top-tier solutions that drive business success.

In today's rapidly changing business landscape, organizations are under constant pressure to adapt, innovate, and make data-driven decisions. To meet these challenges head-on, many companies turn to SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products) software, a leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. At the heart of SAP real-time projects lies the fundamental premise of leveraging technology to address complex business challenges. These projects aim to harness the capabilities of SAP software to optimize processes, streamline operations, and enhance decision-making. They are not mere simulations but practical, hands-on applications within live business environments. Each real-time project revolves around a specific business goal, and its success is often gauged by the extent to which these objectives are achieved. SAP real-time projects are as diverse as the organizations that undertake them. They encompass a variety of initiatives, each tailored to meet specific business needs.

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

Deloitte’s Shift Index shows, the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company has declined from around 75 years half a century ago to less than 15 years today.

People who cannot temporarily let go of their role and status, or set aside their own expertise and opinions, will fail to develop empathy with others’ conflicting thoughts,

experiences, or mental models. The ability to listen and ask the right questions becomes a powerful skill, and the insights it brings are the foundation of effective problem solving and experimentation.

Gamestorming by David Gray et al.,69 and the supporting Go Gamestorming Wiki,

Having empathy for customers and users is a powerful force. When we empathize, we enhance our ability to receive and process information.77 Empathy in design requires deliberate practice. We must design experiments and interaction opportunities to connect with our customers and users in meaningful ways and challenge our assumptions, preconceptions, and prejudices. We need to assume the role of an interested inquirer, trying to understand the challenges they experience.

If the cultural and management barriers are simply too strong for this kind of “ambidextrous” approach, the alternative is to spin off a maximally independent business unit.

How Do You Choose Which Projects to Support? How Do You Prioritize? That’s a problem we look forward to having. We look for who’s most ready to build an MVP. Sometimes it’s very clear what a team aims to build and the issue is having time or support to do it. Those teams are perfect for us to help. On the other hand, we can usually see when someone has an idea that hasn’t really been thought through. Sometimes we recommended that they sign up for LeanStartIN, a two-day internal event where they get help designing their business model and running lean experiments that don’t involve coding. At the end of that experience, they’re usually in a much better place to know what they want to build and test. More than 100 teams have gone through it, and they’ve been successful to the tune of generating $20 million in new revenue in eight months.

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

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

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

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

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