Innovative Leader Quotes

The moment you will stop innovating, somebody else will make your product outdated and will become the market leader.

Innovation is not born from the dream, innovation is born from the struggle.

5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself

There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it. Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief - WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care? People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. We are drawn to leaders and organizations that are good at communicating what they believe. Their ability to make us feel like we belong, to make us feel special, safe and not alone is part of what gives them the ability to inspire us. For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea - we have a clear idea of how to act in any situation. Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders—in that order. Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to. You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills. Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left. Trust is maintained when values and beliefs are actively managed. If companies do not actively work to keep clarity, discipline and consistency in balance, then trust starts to break down. All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.

Dance to the beat of your own drum; whether the world likes your rhythmic movements or not.

Average companies give their people something to work on. In contrast, the most innovative organizations give their people something to work toward.

Happy people don’t create anything, their world is one without art and music and skyscrapers, without discoveries and innovations. All leaders, all of your heroes, they’ve been obsessed. Happy people don’t get obsessed, they don’t devote their lives to curing illnesses or making planes take off. The happy leave nothing behind. They live for the sake of living, they’re only on earth as consumers. Not me.

The innovative leader has to be an arsonist and a firefighter.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

You were created, fashioned and designed in a special form to leave in the world something that did not exist before you were born!

It's not time," "Take it easy," "Wait and see," "It's someone else's turn" - none of these stalls are appropriate for a leader in search of change. There's a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late. The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.

Multipliers invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius—innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence.

Do what no one else can do and you will become what no one else can become.

Disruptive innovation is entrepreneurs changing their industry with unique creativity.

This notion that the leader needs to be “in charge” and to “know all the answers” is both dated and destructive. Its impact on others is the sense that they know less, and that they are less than. A recipe for risk aversion if ever I have heard it. Shame becomes fear. Fear leads to risk aversion. Risk aversion kills innovation.

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This [Northern conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.

Steve Jobs says "innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower". But I believe some followers are more innovative than their leaders. Some leaders come perchance.

The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader." - Quoting Derek Sivers

Creativity is the new currency, so, are you credited with new thoughts or overdrawn in old thinking?

Don’t always complain the way isn’t there. If you can’t find the way, create it.

Talent silences your competition; genius deafens them.

Companies that are made up of clusters of leaders will actually accelerate their growth by speeding up their rate of innovation as their competition pulls back, build better teams by investing in people while their rivals shrink training budgets, and pick up top talent as their industry peers lay people off. And so fast companies get that unsettling times are actually gifts for them and periods to get so far ahead of the competition that they can never catch up.

The secret killer of innovation is shame. You can’t measure it, but it is there. Every time someone holds back on a new idea, fails to give their manager much needed feedback, and is afraid to speak up in front of a client you can be sure shame played a part. That deep fear we all have of being wrong, of being belittled and of feeling less than, is what stops us taking the very risks required to move our companies forward. If you want a culture of creativity and innovation, where sensible risks are embraced on both a market and individual level, start by developing the ability of managers to cultivate an openness to vulnerability in their teams. And this, paradoxically perhaps, requires first that they are vulnerable themselves. This notion that the leader needs to be “in charge” and to “know all the answers” is both dated and destructive. Its impact on others is the sense that they know less, and that they are less than. A recipe for risk aversion if ever I have heard it. Shame becomes fear. Fear leads to risk aversion. Risk aversion kills innovation.

For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs. It’s not “integrity,” it’s “always do the right thing.” It’s not “innovation,” it’s “look at the problem from a different angle.” Articulating our values as verbs gives us a clear idea … we

All great people of history, all the heroes and leaders and innovators who lit humanity’s way out of darkness and ignorance, forged within themselves the courage to overcome their internal conflicts when it mattered most. In many ways, they are just like us: They worried. They procrastinated. They sometimes had lower opinions of their fellow human beings. But what made them celebrated, what pushed society forward, what gave birth to their legend, was their sheer will to overcome such impulses and to faithfully, actively, and lovingly fight for a better life for themselves and others. Let us learn from them, let us master ourselves, and let us now add our own chapter of courage to the good book of humanity.

Bridges take people across rivers. Leaders take people across ignorance. With a leader, the destination of a journey is sure.

Entrepreneur, if you're going to start up, make sure you start up with excellence in mind

An entrepreneur is a leader of excellence, trailblazer and pioneer who constantly brings change to their generation.

If you are someone who dislikes, condemns and rejects new ideas, you aren’t fit to lead.

If records refuse to be broken, shatter them.

It's excellence in leadership when everyone wants to manufacture a black shoe and you manufacture a designer black shoe with gold medal on top. Do something new; do something better!

If leaders really want people to show up, speak out, take chances, and innovate, we have to create cultures where people feel safe—where their belonging is not threatened by speaking out and they are supported when they make the decision to brave the wilderness, stand alone, and speak truth to bullshit.

The main benefit of innovation for your organization is not competitive advantage. It is survival.

The reason why nothing happens is because nothing was done. Something will happen when something is done. Leaders take actions!

Innovative wisdom with purpose defines a leader.

Like so many before it, the company confused innovation with novelty.

The clear purpose of the leader is to give a clear purpose to the team.

Thinking outside of the box keeps you from suffocating inside of one.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

The reason most of your staff are asleep and disengaged, is because you have boring, and bully managers, and no REAL Leaders to inspire and unleash potential.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.’ – Steve Jobs

A flexible mind changes itself and builds a better model as it gathers more data about reality.

in order to upgrade yourself, you have to pay attention to the spiritual, emotional, cognitive, and physical parts of life all at the same time.

instead of discovering who you are, you become powerful when you decide who you are.

offering gratitude to the people who challenge you is part of overcoming fear.

Can’t” is always a lie. Learn to see it that way, and you’ll solve problems differently.

Creative people don’t avoid failure. They see it as a friend. They know that if they are to experiment, innovate, and create, they will fail. They embrace risk.

The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their characters. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it – and companies cannot grow without innovation. Great leaders almost always exude self-confidence.

Good Design is:   1.  innovative   2.  what makes a product useful   3.  aesthetic   4.  what makes a product understandable   5.  unobtrusive   6.  honest   7.  long-lasting   8.  thorough down to the last detail   9.  environmentally friendly 10.  as little design as possible

The nation once idolized astronauts and civil rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now it worships tech innovators who generate billions and move financial markets. We get the heroes we deserve.

Happiness is for children and animals, it doesn’t have any biological function. Happy people don’t create anything, their world is one without art and music and skyscrapers, without discoveries and innovations. All leaders, all of your heroes, they’ve been obsessed. Happy people don’t get obsessed, they don’t devote their lives to curing illnesses or making planes take off. The happy leave nothing behind. They live for the sake of living, they’re only on earth as consumers. Not me.

getting people to follow your lead is an outdated notion and that today, leadership is more about empowering and serving others. They believe that a leader creates the conditions and environment that enable people to be innovative and take action.

Our lives are marked by the people who choose to matter more: the teacher who encouraged our curiosity, the neighbor who lent a helping hand in time of need, the great leaders and perceptive thinkers whose vision and innovation improve the quality of our lives. And that's what it means to matter more. It's not about pursuit of riches or fame. It's about making a difference in people's lives. Remembered or not, lived out in a small town or on the world stage, the journey of relevance matters.

What I hope is clear at this point is that you don't have to be the boss to be a leader. The leader's job is to create and nurture the culture we all need to do our best work. And so anytime you play a role in doing that, you are exercising leadership.

I have learned to prioritize my actions into three buckets: things that drain my energy, things I don’t mind and are important and useful, and things that give me energy and bring me joy. My goal is to break my daily actions down so that I spend none of my time on tasks that fall into the first category, 10 percent of my time on the second category, and 90 percent of my time in the final category, the one that Robert Greene calls primal inclinations. When I find myself drifting too far from the goal, I reset my actions.

Teaching is a Creative profession, it is our duty as School Leaders and Education Influencers to offer the right climate to foster innovation and support Innovative Teaching practices within our schools, and that's what will make our students succeed in the 21st century

Words are powerful. They set expectations and limits and send messages to our brains and even our bodies about how much we are capable of. Language is a part of your mental software. Use it consciously and with precision, and you will achieve things you probably never thought you could.

The most successful endeavors in the digital age were those run by leaders who fostered collaboration while also providing a clear vision. Too often these are seen as conflicting traits: a leader is either very inclusive or a passionate visionary. But the best leaders could be both. Robert

Authentic leaders inspire us to engage with each other in powerful dreams that make the impossible possible. We are called on to persevere despite failure and pursue a purpose beyond the paycheck. This is at the core of innovation. It requires aligning the dreams of each individual to the broader dream of the organization.

One thing that distinguishes a boss from a leader is the ability to suspend belief and disbelief so that innovations and new processes will have a chance to emerge.

If leaders want people to try new things, they have to openly show that they are willing to do the same.

Walt Disney has been described as an innovator, which means he took things that already existed and re-combined them to create something new.

When you think there is nothing left to improve on, your business dies, for there is no shortage of innovators

Limited Resources + Increasing Passion = Exponential Innovation

You can build your “willpower muscle” the same way you strengthen any muscle in your body: by doing hard things you don’t want to do. A simple trick I use is to keep a heavy-duty spring-loaded hand-grip trainer on my desk. When I think about it, I squeeze it until it burns and my arm tells me to stop and then keep squeezing. Another technique I use is to hold my breath until my lungs scream at me to breathe and then hold it longer. When you successfully do the things you don’t want to do, everything else seems easier by comparison. Your willpower grows.

Innovation liberalism is "a liberalism of the rich," to use the straightforward phrase of local labor leader Harris Gruman. This doctrine has no patience with the idea that everyone should share in society's wealth. What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect meritocracy--a system where everyone gets an equal chance and the truly talented get to rise. Once that requirement is satisfied--once diversity has been achieved and the brilliant people of all races and genders have been identified and credentialed--this species of liberal can't really conceive of any further grievance against the system. The demands of ordinary working-class people, Gruman says, are unpersuasive to them: "Janitors, fast-food servers home care or child care providers--most of whom are women and people of color--they don't have college degrees." And if you don't have a college degree in Boston--brother, you've got no one to blame but yourself.

Every strength has a corresponding challenge and every challenge has a corresponding strength. The inattentive child may be a deep thinker. The uncooperative child may be a good leader. The emotionally-charged child may be gifted with exceptional empathy. The rule-defying child may be an out-of-the-box innovator. When faced with challenging behaviors, look for the corresponding strength, and focus on nurturing that gift while providing gentle guidance and coping techniques for the challenging areas. That is the essence of working with, instead of against, our children.

if when you look at the world you see joy and happiness, the brain will translate that joy and happiness into chemistry, such as a dopamine release from feeling pleasure. This chemistry enhances growth. If you look at the world through a lens of fear, it will cause the brain to release stress hormones and inflammatory agents that will put you into a state of self-protection, which halts growth.

I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information, say 1975. So a fifty-year dream." "I think what's happened is that because they themselves know less than their predecessors, innovators and leaders today have remade the world in their own image. Spellchecks. Search engines. They've remodeled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage. And I should think that increasingly they'll carry on reshaping the world to accommodate a net loss of knowledge.

market leader in interest rate swaps. There was a natural role for a blue-chip corporation with the highest credit rating to stand in the middle of swaps and long-term options and the other risk-spawning innovations. The traits required of this corporation were that it not be a bank—and thus subject to bank regulation, and the need to reserve capital against risky assets—and that it be willing and able to bury exotic risks on its

Getting ahead of the next curve requires courage and communication: Courage to determine the next bold move, and communication to keep the troops committed to the value of moving forward. Rallying stakeholders to move together in a common course of action is all part of the innovation and survival process. Leaders at every level in an organization need to be skillful at creating resonance if that organization is to control its own destiny.

In the next chapters I will deal with factors that have helped make this happen, including better leaders, a revival of African entrepreneurship, the return of the great diaspora and a hungry, innovative young population—the largest demographic of young people in the world. But I will start with what I believe has been the most important factor of all. Despite Africa’s size and the great drama of her story—colonialism, war, famine, disease, dictatorship, corruption, hundreds of billions of dollars in wasted aid—it is astonishing to me that the thing that has probably helped us more than anything else is a tiny little device that can fit in your pocket. It’s called a cell phone—and it’s been a game changer.

Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”34 Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.” What else could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable social networking. Even the personal computer, which was originally embraced as a tool for individual creativity, inevitably led to the rise of modems, online services, and eventually Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare. Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own volition nor seek companionship for its own sake. When Alan Turing asserted that machines would someday behave like humans, his critics countered that they would never be able to show affection or crave intimacy. To indulge Turing, perhaps we could program a machine to feign affection and pretend to seek intimacy, just as humans sometimes do. But Turing, more than almost anyone, would probably know the difference. According to the second part of Aristotle’s quote, the nonsocial nature of computers suggests that they are “either a beast or a god.” Actually, they are neither. Despite all of the proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.

Church leader. I urge you to teach the whole counsel of God. Make sure your chief motive is feeding the sheep truth and genuinely reaching the lost with the full biblical message of salvation rather than building a big following. If your primary goal is to get those who attend to come back to next week’s service, ask the Holy Spirit to forgive you and refocus your principal strategy on shepherding the flock of God with truth. Stay relevant, fresh, and innovative in method but timeless in message. Believer

Yet when most people choose a career, they heed the well-meaning advice of their parents and friends or chase money instead of pursuing the things they truly care about. You can get pretty far this way, but you’ll never develop true mastery in something you don’t love because you won’t be learning at your optimum rate. Robert says that if everyone discovered the one thing they really loved and spent all of his or her time and energy on it, mastery would develop organically. I can attest to the fact that it does.

Focusing on efficiency rather than innovation. Because something has worked efficiently in the past, it does not mean that it will in the future. This focus on efficiency leads to adhering strictly to certain plans. And causes the leader not to step out of the box.

Good employees are skilled; great employees are talented. Good employees are friendly; great employees are devoted. Good employees are cautious; great employees are brave. Good employees are calm; great employees are confident. Good employees are educated; great employees are experienced. Good managers are encouraging; great supervisors are forgiving. Good managers are calm; great supervisors are caring. Good managers are truthful; great supervisors are sincere. Good managers are compassionate; great supervisors are generous. Good managers are likable; great supervisors are loving. Good leaders are intelligent; great leaders are wise. Good leaders are bold; great leaders are fearless. Good leaders are artful; great leaders are kind. Good leaders are warriors; great leaders are servants. Good leaders are managers; great leaders are innovators.

We are committed to involving as many people as possible, as young as possible, as soon as possible. Sometimes too young and too soon! But we intentionally err on the side of too fast rather than too slow. We don’t wait until people feel “prepared” or “fully equipped.” Seriously, when is anyone ever completely prepared for ministry? Ministry makes people’s faith bigger. If you want to increase someone’s confidence in God, put him in a ministry position before he feels fully equipped. The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot. Assign responsibility, not tasks. At the end of the day, it’s application that makes all the difference. Truth isn’t helpful if no one understands or remembers it. If you want a church full of biblically educated believers, just teach what the Bible says. If you want to make a difference in your community and possibly the world, give people handles, next steps, and specific applications. Challenge them to do something. As we’ve all seen, it’s not safe to assume that people automatically know what to do with what they’ve been taught. They need specific direction. This is hard. This requires an extra step in preparation. But this is how you grow people. Your current template is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting. We must remove every possible obstacle from the path of the disinterested, suspicious, here-against-my-will, would-rather-be-somewhere-else, unchurched guests. The parking lot, hallways, auditorium, and stage must be obstacle-free zones. As a preacher, it’s my responsibility to offend people with the gospel. That’s one reason we work so hard not to offend them in the parking lot, the hallway, at check-in, or in the early portions of our service. We want people to come back the following week for another round of offending! Present the gospel in uncompromising terms, preach hard against sin, and tackle the most emotionally charged topics in culture, while providing an environment where unchurched people feel comfortable. The approach a church chooses trumps its purpose every time. Nothing says hypocrite faster than Christians expecting non-Christians to behave like Christians when half the Christians don’t act like it half the time. When you give non-Christians an out, they respond by leaning in. Especially if you invite them rather than expect them. There’s a big difference between being expected to do something and being invited to try something. There is an inexorable link between an organization’s vision and its appetite for improvement. Vision exposes what has yet to be accomplished. In this way, vision has the power to create a healthy sense of organizational discontent. A leader who continually keeps the vision out in front of his or her staff creates a thirst for improvement. Vision-centric churches expect change. Change is a means to an end. Change is critical to making what could and should be a reality. Write your vision in ink; everything else should be penciled in. Plans change. Vision remains the same. It is natural to assume that what worked in the past will always work. But, of course, that way of thinking is lethal. And the longer it goes unchallenged, the more difficult it is to identify and eradicate. Every innovation has an expiration date. The primary reason churches cling to outdated models and programs is that they lack leadership.

Our job, sometimes, is simply to be the spark, help build confidence, and then get out of the way. If innovation in any school or school division is solely dependent upon one person, it will continue to happen in pockets. In contrast, when we focus on empowering learners to become leaders, they help spread ideas.

As leaders, if we ask teachers to use their own time to do anything, what we’re really telling them is: it’s not important. The focus on compliance and implementation of programs in much of today’s professional development does not inspire teachers to be creative, nor does it foster a culture of innovation. Instead, it forces inspired educators to color outside the lines, and even break the rules, to create relevant opportunities for their students. These outliers form pockets of innovation. Their results surprise us. Their students remember them as “great teachers,” not because of the test scores they received but because their lives were touched.

Why is it so hard to question anything about Islam? The obvious answer is that there is now an internationally organized 'honor brigade' that exists to prevent such questioning. The deeper historical answer may lie in the fear of many Muslim clerics that allowing critical thought might lead many to leave Islam. [...] a staunch Medina Muslim and a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, has said: 'If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment Islam would not exist today.' [...] The clerics fear that even the smallest questions will lead to doubt, doubt will lead to more questions, and ultimately the questioning mind will demand not only answers but also innovations.

Looking back at those dark days, I am sometimes reminded of what happened to the great Chinese imperial fleet in the fifteenth century. Back then, the Chinese were the undisputed leaders in science and exploration. They invented gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press. They were unparalleled in military power and technology. Meanwhile, medieval Europe was wracked by religious wars and mired in inquisitions, witch trials, and superstition, and great scientists and visionaries like Giordano Bruno and Galileo were often either burned alive or placed under house arrest, their works banned. Europe, at the time, was a net importer of technology, not a source of innovation.

There is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to be a leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for enemies all those who are well off under the old order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.

French scientists feared that Paris was going to lose its status as a centre for innovative scientific thinking. At the Académie des Sciences, Humboldt said, the savants did little and what little they did often ended in quarrels. Even worse, the scholars had formed a secret committee to sanitize the library there – removing books that propounded liberal ideas like those written by Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. When the childless Louis XVIII died in September 1824 his brother Charles X, the leader of the ultra-royalists, became king. All those who believed in liberty and in the values of the revolution knew that the intellectual climate could only become more repressive.

A leadership comfort zone brings stagnancy, deprives one of innovation, stifles growth and frustrates both the leader and the team they lead. Your personal preferences like leadership style, communication style, prejudices, habits and mannerisms must be effectively managed so that they do not work against you. You have to be careful that your strengths do not end up becoming a hindering comfort zone. Seek to lead, driven by a cause.

As an engineer trained in the U.S., I look at the assault on evolution—which is actually an assault on science overall—as much more than an intellectual issue; for me, it’s personal. I feel strongly that we need the young people of today to become the scientists and the engineers of tomorrow so that my native United States continues to be a world leader in discovery and innovation. If we suppress science in this country, we are headed for trouble.

Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile has conducted extensive research on employees working in creative endeavors in order to understand how work environments foster or impede creativity and innovation. She has consistently found that work environments in which employees have a high degree of operational autonomy lead to the highest degree of creativity and innovation. Operational autonomy, of course, can be seen as the extreme version of process fairness.

The pity is that many Americans outside the elite bubbles know exactly what’s wrong, but our leaders seem determined to do nothing about it. Any attempt to cut the government chains and anchors off businesses so they can get back to growing, innovating, and creating jobs is demagogued as “tax breaks for the rich” or “favors for the one-percenters.” Never mind that many of those who would benefit are small-business owners who’ve been decimated over the past few years, first by the economic meltdown, then by government policies put in place to “fix” it. The money printed by the Fed to keep the economy pumped up flows to Wall Street, not Main Street, so small businesses aren’t borrowing it to pay for expansion. Even if they wanted to expand, about a third of all U.S. workers are employed by businesses with fifty or fewer employees, and Obamacare insures that if they hire a fifty-first, they’ll face crippling new costs for mandated health care.

I don’t know how history is taught here in Japan, “ he told the audience when he traveled there in 1985 to give an acceptance speech, ”but in the United States in my college days, most of the time was spent on the study of political leaders and wars – Ceasars, Napoleons, and Hitlers. I think this is totally wrong. The important people and events of history are the thinkers and innovators, the Darwins, Newtons, Beethovens whose work continues to grow in influence in a positive fashion

Becoming accomplished at what you do is no easy task, nor is the goal reached in a day. The process is time consuming, requires dedication, innovative ideas, meticulous strategizing and can be quite tedious at times. For many, the ultimate objective is to challenge the status quo, change the game, chart unexplored territory, and set a new standard of excellence. Sometimes hitting those marks is its own reward. Seeing others apply your blueprint to construct their own path to success is even more fulfilling. Leaders are motivated by believers! Bask in the imitation of others. After all, it is the highest form of flattery!

The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment....The causes and motives of sedition are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending people joineth them in a common cause.' The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. 'Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions...that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.' A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: 'Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.' But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; 'the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people;' and 'Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?' What Bacon wants is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administration; and above all a philosopher-king. 'It is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.' He mentions Seneca, Antonius Pius and Aurelius; it was his hope that to their names posterity would add his own.

Anyone who’s ever been in a leadership role quickly learns that you’re squeezed between others’ lofty expectations and your own personal limitations. You realize that while others want you to be of impeccable character, you’re not always without fault. You learn that you can’t see around every corner, and even if you know your way forward everyone may not end up at the same destination, let alone be on time. You discover that despite your best efforts to introduce brilliant innovations, most of them don’t succeed. You find that you sometimes get angry and short, and that you don’t always listen carefully to what others have to say. You’re reminded that you don’t always treat everyone with dignity and respect. You recognize that others deserve more credit than they get, and that you’ve failed to say thank you. You know that sometimes you get, and accept, more credit than you deserve. In other words, you realize that you’re human.

In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen. How, then, do you make failure into something people can face without fear? Part of the answer is simple: If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others. You don’t run from it or pretend it doesn’t exist. That is why I make a point of being open about our meltdowns inside Pixar, because I believe they teach us something important: Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them. My goal is not to drive fear out completely, because fear is inevitable in high-stakes situations. What I want to do is loosen its grip on us. While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future. I

Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive. We now exist in a world where we can communicate with coworkers at any hour, access vital documents over smartphones, learn any fact within seconds, and have almost any product delivered to our doorstep within twenty-four hours. Companies can design gadgets in California, collect orders from customers in Barcelona, email blueprints to Shenzhen, and track deliveries from anywhere on earth. Parents can auto-sync the family’s schedules, pay bills online while lying in bed, and locate the kids’ phones one minute after curfew. We are living through an economic and social revolution that is as profound, in many ways, as the agrarian and industrial revolutions of previous eras. These advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, they often seem to fill our days with more work and stress. In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity—the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists—rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us. There are some people, however, who have figured out how to master this changing world. There are some companies that have discovered how to find advantages amid these rapid shifts. We now know how productivity really functions. We know which choices matter most and bring success within closer reach. We know how to set goals that make the audacious achievable; how to reframe situations so that instead of seeing problems, we notice hidden opportunities; how to open our minds to new, creative connections; and how to learn faster by slowing down the data that is speeding past us.

claque, aka canned laughter It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s nothing new under the sun (a heavenly body, by the way, that some Indian ascetics stare at till they go blind). I knew that some things had a history—the Constitution, rhythm and blues, Canada—but it’s the odd little things that surprise me with their storied past. This first struck me when I was reading about anesthetics and I learned that, in the early 1840s, it became fashionable to hold parties where guests would inhale nitrous oxide out of bladders. In other words, Whip-it parties! We held the exact same kind of parties in high school. We’d buy fourteen cans of Reddi-Wip and suck on them till we had successfully obliterated a couple of million neurons and face-planted on my friend Andy’s couch. And we thought we were so cutting edge. And now, I learn about claque, which is essentially a highbrow French word for canned laughter. Canned laughter was invented long before Lucille Ball stuffed chocolates in her face or Ralph Kramden threatened his wife with extreme violence. It goes back to the 4th century B.C., when Greek playwrights hired bands of helpers to laugh at their comedies in order to influence the judges. The Romans also stacked the audience, but they were apparently more interested in applause than chuckles: Nero—emperor and wannabe musician—employed a group of five thousand knights and soldiers to accompany him on his concert tours. But the golden age of canned laughter came in 19th-century France. Almost every theater in France was forced to hire a band called a claque—from claquer, “to clap.” The influential claque leaders, called the chefs de claque, got a monthly payment from the actors. And the brilliant innovation they came up with was specialization. Each claque member had his or her own important job to perform: There were the rieurs, who laughed loudly during comedies. There were the bisseurs, who shouted for encores. There were the commissaires, who would elbow their neighbors and say, “This is the good part.” And my favorite of all, the pleureuses, women who were paid good francs to weep at the sad parts of tragedies. I love this idea. I’m not sure why the networks never thought of canned crying. You’d be watching an ER episode, and a softball player would come in with a bat splinter through his forehead, and you’d hear a little whimper in the background, turning into a wave of sobs. Julie already has trouble keeping her cheeks dry, seeing as she cried during the Joe Millionaire finale. If they added canned crying, she’d be a mess.

Rejecting failure and avoiding mistakes seem like high-minded goals, but they are fundamentally misguided. Take something like the Golden Fleece Awards, which were established in 1975 to call attention to government-funded projects that were particularly egregious wastes of money. (Among the winners were things like an $84,000 study on love commissioned by the National Science Foundation, and a $3,000 Department of Defense study that examined whether people in the military should carry umbrellas.) While such scrutiny may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it had a chilling effect on research. No one wanted to “win” a Golden Fleece Award because, under the guise of avoiding waste, its organizers had inadvertently made it dangerous and embarrassing for everyone to make mistakes. The truth is, if you fund thousands of research projects every year, some will have obvious, measurable, positive impacts, and others will go nowhere. We aren’t very good at predicting the future—that’s a given—and yet the Golden Fleece Awards tacitly implied that researchers should know before they do their research whether or not the results of that research would have value. Failure was being used as a weapon, rather than as an agent of learning. And that had fallout: The fact that failing could earn you a very public flogging distorted the way researchers chose projects. The politics of failure, then, impeded our progress. There’s a quick way to determine if your company has embraced the negative definition of failure. Ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered. Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together to untangle the causes of problems that might be avoided going forward? Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure. Failure is difficult enough without it being compounded by the search for a scapegoat. In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen. How, then, do you make failure into something people can face without fear? Part of the answer is simple: If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others. You don’t run from it or pretend it doesn’t exist. That is why I make a point of being open about our meltdowns inside Pixar, because I believe they teach us something important: Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them. My goal is not to drive fear out completely, because fear is inevitable in high-stakes situations. What I want to do is loosen its grip on us. While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.

SEVEN CHANGE MASTERY SHIFTS • Change Mastery Shift 1: From Problem Focus to Opportunity Focus. Effective leaders tend to perceive and to innovate on the opportunities inherent in change. • Change Mastery Shift 2: From Short-Term Focus to Long-Term Focus. Effective leaders don’t lose sight of their long-term vision in the midst of change. • Change Mastery Shift 3: From Circumstance Focus to Purpose Focus. Effective leaders maintain a clear sense of purpose, value, and meaning to rise above immediate circumstances. • Change Mastery Shift 4: From Control Focus to Agility Focus. Effective leaders understand that control is a management principle that yields a certain degree of results. However, agility, flexibility, and innovation are leadership principles that sustain results over the long haul. • Change Mastery Shift 5: From Self-Focus to Service. Effective leaders buffer their teams and organizations from the stress of change by managing, neutralizing, and/or transcending their own stress. • Change Mastery Shift 6: From Expertise Focus to Listening Focus. Effective leaders stay open and practice authentic listening to stay connected with others and to consider multiple, innovative solutions. • Change Mastery Shift 7: From Doubt Focus to Trust Focus. Effective leaders are more secure in themselves; they possess a sense that they can handle whatever may come their way; their self-awareness and self-trust are bigger than the circumstances of change.

Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen