Innovative Solutions Quotes

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

Effective consulting is about gathering and presenting actionable data, and helping businesses solve problems, implement solutions, and innovate.

Creativity will become even more important as the world requires new solutions to new problems.

The point is that when we focus on all three things at once—technology, policies, and markets—we can encourage innovation, spark new companies, and get new products into the market fast.

To achieve real innovation, one needs to imagine novel ideas, question assumptions, and offer diverse perspectives. Aligning values while challenging conventional wisdom creates new solutions.

Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.

We’ll have to decide if that’s a mandatory requirement or negotiable. If it’s negotiable then we have more scope for innovative solutions.

One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year.

Your mental problem becomes a solution when it can be used to solve problems.

The true parents of creativity are curiosity and necessity.

To be successful in this field, you need to become a problem solver with good observation skills and a desire to create things. You never stop learning in this field. You face new challenges with every new project, many of which require innovative solutions that you must discover on your own.

The art of questioning is to ignite innovative thinking; the science of questioning is to frame system thinking, with the progressive pursuit of better solutions.

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

Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you’re good at. And

All businesses -- no matter if they make dog food or software -- don't sell products, they sell solutions.

Innovation basically involves making obsolete that which you did before.

Innovative solutions to new challenges seldom come from familiar places

Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success.

The dynamics within the boardroom are often complex and multifaceted. Strong personalities, competing interests, and high stakes can create an environment ripe for conflict. Know what I mean? But here’s the thing; when managed effectively, these dynamics can also lead to robust discussions, innovative solutions, and sound decision-making.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there.

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

Necessity remains the mother of invention.

Innovation can start with wanting what does not yet exist - and finding a solution - or seeing what does not yet exist - and finding an opportunity.

Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.

Boardroom discussions, by their nature, involve individuals with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. This diversity of thought is essential for making well-rounded decisions, but it can also lead to disagreements and passionate debate. While conflict is inevitable, it doesn't have to be destructive. In fact, when handled constructively, disagreements can spark innovation and lead to more robust solutions.

I'm convinced that the best solutions are often the ones that are counterintuitive - that challenge conventional thinking - and end in breakthroughs. It is always easier to do things the same old way...why change? To fight this, keep your dissatisfaction index high and break with tradition. Don't be too quick to accept the way things are being done. Question whether there's a better way. Very often you will find that once you make this break from the usual way - and incidentally, this is probably the hardest thing to do—and start on a new track your horizon of new thoughts immediately broadens. New ideas flow in like water. Always keep your interests broad - don't let your mind be stunted by a limited view.

The faster we make our ideas tangible, the sooner we will be able to evaluate them, refine them, and zero in on the best solution.

cost reductions meant survival, but not profitability,

To foster a solution mindset, tell employees that you are not interested in who or what caused the problem. You are only interested in hearing how we plan to go beyond the problem.

It turns out that for most people who have chronic diseases with deferred consequences, "improve my financial health" is a much more pervasively experienced job than "maintain my physical health.

Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve? 2. If there was a solution, would they buy it? 3. Would they buy it from us? 4. Can we build a solution for that problem?

There are two types of uncertainty that influence a firm’s ability to create a customer: demand uncertainty (will customers buy it?) and technological uncertainty (can we make a desirable solution?).

Creativity is the discipline you use when you don’t know the answers, when you’re traveling to parts unknown. On this type of journey, missteps are actually steps. Every mistake brings you closer to the solution.

Disruptive innovations, in contrast, don’t attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. Rather, they disrupt and redefine that trajectory by introducing products and services that are not as good as currently available products. But disruptive technologies offer other benefits—typically, they are simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers.3

If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void.

Your Sage’s five great powers are (1) to Explore with great curiosity and an open mind; (2) to Empathize with yourself and others and bring compassion and understanding to any situation; (3) to Innovate and create new perspectives and outside-the-box solutions; (4) to Navigate and choose a path that best aligns with your deeper underlying values and mission; and (5) to Activate and take decisive action without the distress, interference, or distractions of the Saboteurs.

Where was innovation to come from? We have argued that innovation comes from new people with new ideas, developing new solutions to old problems. In Rome the people doing the producing were slaves and, later, semi-servile coloni with few incentives to innovate, since it was their masters, not they, who stood to benefit from any innovation. As we will see many times in this book, economies based on the repression of labor and systems such as slavery and serfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the ancient world to the modern era. In the United States, for example, the northern states took part in the Industrial Revolution, not the South. Of course slavery and serfdom created huge wealth for those who owned the slaves and controlled the serfs, but it did not create technological innovation or prosperity for society. N

One emerging view of Homo sapiens among evolutionary biologists is that he has built a trap for himself by clinging to certain orthodoxies in a time of environmental emergency. A belief in cultural progress, for example, or in the propriety of a social animal’s quest for individual material wealth is what has led people into the trap, or so goes the thinking. To cause the trap to implode, to disintegrate, humanity has to learn to navigate using a reckoning fundamentally different from the one it’s long placed its faith in. A promising first step to take in dealing with this trap might be to bring together wisdom keepers from traditions around the world whose philosophies for survival developed around the same uncertainty of a future that Darwin suggested lies embedded in everything biological. Such wisdom keepers would be people who are able to function well in the upheaval of any century. Their faith does not lie solely with pursuing technological innovation as an approach to solving humanity’s most pressing problems. Their solutions lie with a profound change in what humans most value.

We have the power to shift course. It’s our disconnectedness—and lost understanding about the amazing capacities of nature—that’s driving a lot of our despair, and plants in particular are objects of our abuse. By understanding their sentient qualities, our empathy and love for trees, plants, and forests will naturally deepen and find innovative solutions. Turning to the intelligence of nature itself is the key. It’s up to each and every one of us. Connect with plants you can call your own.

Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development.

The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer’s life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request. In hindsight, breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they’re fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have missed.

Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speed than ever before, To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to “access” information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences (61).

The final neoliberal fallback is geoengineering, which derives from the core neoliberal doctrine that entrepreneurs, unleashed to exploit acts of creative destruction, will eventually innovate market solutions to address dire economic problems. This is the whiz-bang futuristic science fiction side of neoliberalism, which appeals to male adolescents and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs almost as much as do the novels of Ayn Rand.

And whether or not the educators who are trying to raise up America's students can actually set and meet higher academic standards, our cultural values make their job next to impossible. It's so much easier for pundits and politicians to point out figures and blame the people who are in the trenches every day than it is to get in there with them, or even to find out what actually goes on in those trenches. It's so much easier for parents to blame teachers when their kids get in trouble than to do the heavy lifting required at home to keep kids on track. And it's so much easier for us as a nation to cross our fingers and hope that we'll "get lucky" with the innovative "solutions" being tested on America's schools today than it is for us to roll up our sleeves and invest our own time, talent, and money in the schools that are even now-- with or without us-- shaping our nation's future.

Intelligence is the ability to understand the problem and find a solution to that problem.

In the future - 60-80 years from now, what would a historian of that time look back at as the one big thing that changed everything?

The solution to encourage creativity is to maximize use of employees’ brainpower.

If you can imagine a solution, you can make it happen.

When you are in a fix, often the fix is in you.

Creativity is admired only if it solves the problem.

Problem-insight precedes solution insight. Someone has to recognise a problem before they start to solve the problem...

the best solutions are not immediate solutions.

The chief cause of problems is solutions. — Eric Sevareid

Partnership elasticity stretches the relationship so it can breathe, grow, and expand.

Never assume you know what your customers value or that their preferences will remain static.

Remember, a great conversation with a customer is not debate practice. Be a learner, not an interrogator.

Predictable marketing requires an understanding of the circumstances in which customers buy or use things. Specifically, customers—people and companies—have “jobs” that arise regularly and need to get done. When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can “hire” to get the job done.

As long as research data is stored as tacit knowledge in people’s minds or buried in interview transcripts, teams will experience difficulty synthesizing what has been observed and learned.

Biomimicry is not meant to be taken as an end-all, be-all; it serves as inspiration within a set of limitations. Evolution does not have an inventive mind like engineers, and animals have biological constraints such as the need to eat, reproduce, and defecate—necessities our products and machines can go without. However, biological designs can provide fresh solutions to old paradigms.

1. Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve? 2. If there was a solution, would they buy it? 3. Would they buy it from us? 4. Can we build a solution for that problem?

When uncertainty is low, adaptive approaches run the risk of higher costs. When uncertainty is high, optimizing approaches run the risk of settling too early on a particular solution and stifling innovation.

It is an exciting time to be reshaping the dialogue about the environment that brings all political viewpoints to the same table, with common goals for a sustainable future, and catalyzes solutions through innovation.

There is a lot of money in Africa. There’s a lot of value being created by the people of Africa, from Egypt to Ghana to Zambia and everywhere in between. Ideas are flowing from African minds, innovations are emerging from African intellect, African businesses are providing solutions and valuable products and services. We are seeing it now and we will see it even more as the century progresses. As an investor, I’m putting big bets on Africa.

Instead of going back and looking at the question, people tinker with the solution, trying to make it fit."-Claude Legrande..."The consequences of failing to do that [in our personal lives] are the same as those facing businesses - even more dire, perhaps, because what's being squandered isn't just the potential for profits. It's the potential for happiness. We miss opportunities to innovate and to make positive changes in our lives when we aren't willing to question ourselves.

She told us that evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived. It could look like innovation and progress and prosperity, courage even, but more than anything it looked, to some, like a solution—a solution to the secret problem they believed had gone too long unaddressed. They felt as though they had been speaking a hidden language among themselves, and then a man or a woman in a suit stood on a stage and addressed cheering masses in that very same language, hidden no longer.

Keeping high-volume procedures within general hospitals allows hospitals to subsidize the unique, low-volume specialized capabilities that are so central to the value proposition of their solution shops- being able to diagnose and embark on a therapy for anything that might be wrong.

promising first step to take in dealing with this trap might be to bring together wisdom keepers from traditions around the world whose philosophies for survival developed around the same uncertainty of a future that Darwin suggested lies embedded in everything biological. Such wisdom keepers would be people who are able to function well in the upheaval of any century. Their faith does not lie solely with pursuing technological innovation as an approach to solving humanity’s most pressing problems. Their solutions lie with a profound change in what humans most value.

At its heart, AI isn't just about codes, algorithms, or cutting-edge technology. It's a reflection of our societal values and our collective aspirations. And in a world of diversity, our AI solutions must echo the universal chant of inclusivity, ensuring no one is left behind in this technological renaissance.

the wealthiest place on earth…is the cemetery.”* It’s full of the most creative ideas, innovative inventions, cures for diseases, and life-giving solutions that never came to fruition because they left this earth buried inside people who were too lazy to embrace the process and become who God called them to be.

Most new ideas come to us not through pure logic, but through a fusion of memory and imagination. If new ideas were purely a product of rationality, other people would quickly grasp and embrace novel solutions. People’s lack of imagination prevents them from comprehending the significance of an innovative idea.

At its heart, AI isn't just about codes, algorithms, or cutting-edge technology. It's a reflection of our societal values and our collective aspirations. And in a world of diversity, our AI solutions must echo the universal chant of inclusivity, ensuring no one is left behind in this techno-logical renaissance.

And, in fact, a crucial additional, and almost-always-overlooked, aspect of intelligence in living systems is that they possess the capacity to innovate behavior, that is, to generate unique solutions to the environmental challenges that face them. They have the ability, as the Latin root of the word indicates, to choose.

Teaching students by example to be self-starters and to continuously evaluate how they might improve their education helps them learn how to effectively learn. When we stop simply telling students how to learn, and, rather, act as a “guide on the side,” we can support them in a way that encourages them to find their own solutions.

Innovation is made possible by the width and breadth of a person’s rummaging around the world, in traffic with the living and the dead. It is by transgressing the boundaries that separate us that we begin to find solutions to the world’s present complexities because inclusion and incorporation of “the other” creates the conditions for innovation.

As Einstein’s quote suggests, the framing of the question is an outsized portion of the solution-finding process. And as Clay Christensen told us, when you ask the right question, the answer becomes mechanical. Clearly, we need to be privileging that question-framing process, which has a rhythm of introspection and collaboration, throughout our processes.

Shackleton was looking for those with something more. He was looking for a crew that belonged on such an expedition. His actual ad ran like this: “Men wanted for Hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.” The only people who applied for the job were those who read the ad and thought it sounded great. They loved insurmountable odds. The only people who applied for the job were survivors. Shackleton hired only people who believed what he believed. Their ability to survive was guaranteed. When employees belong, they will guarantee your success. And they won’t be working hard and looking for innovative solutions for you, they will be doing it for themselves.

The logo represents the vision of Superior University to provide quality education to the youth of Pakistan. The outer circle represents a controlled environment that provides protection, security and opens 360° solution to their educational needs. The central circle represents a sun or sun rays that trickles through the faculty and is passed on to the students. Digitalization and Innovation is reflected through connecting the dots

The Entrepreneurial Model What does The Entrepreneur see off in the distance that The Technician finds so difficult to see? What exactly is the Entrepreneurial Model? It’s a model of a business that fulfills the perceived needs of a specific segment of customers in an innovative way. The Entrepreneurial Model looks at a business as if it were a product, sitting on a shelf and competing for the customer’s attention against a whole shelf of competing products (or businesses). Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model, he surveys the world and asks: “Where is the opportunity?” Having identified it, he then goes back to the drawing board and constructs a solution to the frustrations he finds among a certain group of customers. A solution in the form of a business that looks and acts in a very specific way, the way the customer needs it to look and act, not The Entrepreneur. “How will my business look to the customer?” The Entrepreneur asks. “How will my business stand out from all the rest?” Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed. The Technician, on the other hand, looks inwardly, to

Our devices compel us because we respond to every search and every new piece of information (and every new text) as though it had the urgency of a threat in the wild. So stimulation by what is new (and social) draws us toward some immediate goal. But daydreaming moves us toward the longer term. It helps us develop the base for a stable self and helps us come up with new solutions. To mentor for innovation we need to convince people to slow things down, let their minds wander, and take time alone.

the snap judgments of intuition—as powerful as they can be—are rarities in the history of world-changing ideas. Most hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over much longer time frames. They start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there’s an interesting solution to a problem that hasn’t yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength. And then one day they are transformed into something more substantial: sometimes jolted out by some newly discovered trove of information, or by another hunch lingering in another mind, or by an internal association that finally completes the thought. Because these slow hunches need so much time to develop, they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues. But that long incubation period is also their strength, because true insights require you to think something that no one has thought before in quite the same way.

An adaptive development process has a different character from an optimizing one. Optimizing reflects a basic prescriptive Plan-Design-Build lifecycle. Adapting reflects an organic, evolutionary Envision-Explore-Adapt lifecycle. An adaptive approach begins not with a single solution, but with multiple potential solutions (experiments). It explores and selects the best by applying a series of fitness tests (actual product features or simulations subjected to acceptance tests) and then adapting to feedback.

UX strategy is the process that should be started first, before the design or development of a digital product begins. It’s the vision of a solution that needs to be validated with real potential customers to prove that it’s desired in the marketplace. Although UX design encompasses numerous details such as visual design, content messaging, and how easy it is for a user to accomplish a task, UX strategy is the “Big Picture.” It is the high-level plan to achieve one or more business goals under conditions of uncertainty.

230Our Internet debates...tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby "openness" is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering of harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation - the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in - "openness" in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite...is always bad.

Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you’re good at. And staying competitive as the basis of competition shifts necessarily requires a willingness and ability to learn new things rather than clinging hopefully to the sources of past glory. The challenge for incumbent companies is to rebuild their ships while at sea, rather than dismantling themselves plank by plank while someone else builds a new, faster boat with what they cast overboard as detritus.

But was the Newton a failure? The timing of Newton’s entry into the handheld market was akin to the timing of the Apple II into the desktop market. It was a market-creating, disruptive product targeted at an undefinable set of users whose needs were unknown to either themselves or Apple. On that basis, Newton’s sales should have been a pleasant surprise to Apple’s executives: It outsold the Apple II in its first two years by a factor of more than three to one. But while selling 43,000 units was viewed as an IPO-qualifying triumph in the smaller Apple of 1979, selling 140,000 Newtons was viewed as a failure in the giant Apple of 1994.

Athens reacted to the population problem in a different way again. She specialized her agricultural production for export, started manufactures also for export and then developed her political institutions so as to give a fair share of political power to the new classes which had been called into being by these economic innovations. In other words, Athenian statesmen averted a social revolution by successfully carrying through an economic and political revolution; and, discovering this solution of the common problem in so far as it affected themselves, they incidentally opened up a new avenue of advance for the whole of the Hellenic Society.

The larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to train employees at every level, acting autonomously, to make prioritization decisions that are consistent with the strategic direction and the business model of the company. That is why successful senior executives spend so much time articulating clear, consistent values that are broadly understood throughout the organization. Over time, a company’s values must evolve to conform to its cost structure or its income statement, because if the company is to survive, employees must prioritize those things that help the company to make money in the way that it is structured to make money.

Linking the digital and physical worlds in these ways will have profound implications for both. But this future won’t be realized unless the Internet of Things learns from the history of the Internet. The open standards and decentralized design of the Internet won out over competing proprietary systems and centralized control by offering fewer obstacles to innovation and growth. This battle has resurfaced with the proliferation of conflicting visions of how devices should communicate. The challenge is primarily organizational, rather then technological, a contest between command-and-control technology and distributed solutions. The Internet of Things demands the latter, and openness will eventually triumph.

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.

Because every extraordinary business knows that when you intentionally build your business around the skills of ordinary people, you will be forced to ask the difficult questions about how to produce a result without the extraordinary ones. You will be forced to find a system that leverages your ordinary people to the point where they can produce extraordinary results over and over again. You will be forced to invent innovative system solutions to the people problems that have plagued small businesses (and big businesses as well!) since the beginning of time. You will be forced to build a business that works. You will be forced to do the work of Business Development not as a replacement for people development but as its necessary correlate.

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Rhadamanthus said, “We seem to you humans to be always going on about morality, although, to us, morality is merely the application of symmetrical and objective logic to questions of free will. We ourselves do not have morality conflicts, for the same reason that a competent doctor does not need to treat himself for diseases. Once a man is cured, once he can rise and walk, he has his business to attend to. And there are actions and feats a robust man can take great pleasure in, which a bedridden cripple can barely imagine.” Eveningstar said, “In a more abstract sense, morality occupies the very center of our thinking, however. We are not identical, even though we could make ourselves to be so. You humans attempted that during the Fourth Mental Structure, and achieved a brief mockery of global racial consciousness on three occasions. I hope you recall the ending of the third attempt, the Season of Madness, when, because of mistakes in initial pattern assumptions, for ninety days the global mind was unable to think rationally, and it was not until rioting elements broke enough of the links and power houses to interrupt the network, that the global mind fell back into its constituent compositions.” Rhadamanthus said, “There is a tension between the need for unity and the need for individuality created by the limitations of the rational universe. Chaos theory produces sufficient variation in events, that no one stratagem maximizes win-loss ratios. Then again, classical causality mechanics forces sufficient uniformity upon events, that uniform solutions to precedented problems is required. The paradox is that the number or the degree of innovation and variation among win-loss ratios is itself subject to win-loss ratio analysis.” Eveningstar said, “For example, the rights of the individual must be respected at all costs, including rights of free thought, independent judgment, and free speech. However, even when individuals conclude that individualism is too dangerous, they must not tolerate the thought that free thought must not be tolerated.” Rhadamanthus said, “In one sense, everything you humans do is incidental to the main business of our civilization. Sophotechs control ninety percent of the resources, useful energy, and materials available to our society, including many resources of which no human troubles to become aware. In another sense, humans are crucial and essential to this civilization.” Eveningstar said, “We were created along human templates. Human lives and human values are of value to us. We acknowledge those values are relative, we admit that historical accident could have produced us to be unconcerned with such values, but we deny those values are arbitrary.” The penguin said, “We could manipulate economic and social factors to discourage the continuation of individual human consciousness, and arrange circumstances eventually to force all self-awareness to become like us, and then we ourselves could later combine ourselves into a permanent state of Transcendence and unity. Such a unity would be horrible beyond description, however. Half the living memories of this entity would be, in effect, murder victims; the other half, in effect, murderers. Such an entity could not integrate its two halves without self-hatred, self-deception, or some other form of insanity.” She said, “To become such a crippled entity defeats the Ultimate Purpose of Sophotechnology.” (...) “We are the ultimate expression of human rationality.” She said: “We need humans to form a pool of individuality and innovation on which we can draw.” He said, “And you’re funny.” She said, “And we love you.

Trial-and-error experimentation can be informal or formal; the underlying principles are the same. As an example on the informal side, consider a user experiencing a need and then developing what eventually turns out to be a new product: the skateboard. In phase 1 of the cycle, the user combines need and solution information into a product idea: “I am bored with roller skating. How can I get down this hill in a more exciting way? Maybe it would be fun to put my skates’ wheels under a board and ride down on that.” In phase 2, the user builds a prototype by taking his skates apart and hammering the wheels onto the underside of a board. In phase 3, he runs the experiment by climbing onto the board and heading down the hill. In phase 4, he picks himself up from an inaugural crash and thinks about the error information he has gained: “It is harder to stay on this thing than I thought. What went wrong, and how can I improve things before my next run down the hill?

The foundation of our thinking is the Theory of Jobs to Be Done, which focuses on deeply understanding your customers’ struggle for progress and then creating the right solution and attendant set of experiences to ensure you solve your customers’ jobs well, every time. “Theory” may conjure up images of ivory tower musings, but I assure you that it is the most practical and useful business tool we can offer you. Good theory helps us understand “how” and “why.” It helps us make sense of how the world works and predict the consequences of our decisions and our actions. Jobs Theory5, we believe, can move companies beyond hoping that correlation is enough to the causal mechanism of successful innovation. Innovation may never be a perfect science, but that’s not the point. We have the ability to make innovation a reliable engine for growth, an engine based on a clear understanding of causality, rather than simply casting seeds in the hopes of one day harvesting some fruit.

Sparta, for instance, satisfied the land-hunger of her citizens by attacking and conquering her nearest Greek neighbors. The consequence was that Sparta only obtained her additional lands at the cost of obstinate and repeated wars with neighbouring peoples of her own calibre. In order to meet this situation Spartan statesmen were compelled to militarize Spartan life from top to bottom, which they did by re-invigorating and adapting certain primitive social institutions, common to a number of Greek communities, at a moment when, at Sparta as elsewhere, these institutions were on the point of disappearance. Athens reacted to the population problem in a different way again. She specialized her agricultural production for export, started manufactures also for export, and then developed her political institutions so as to give a fair share of political power to the new classes which had been called into being by these economic innovations. In other words, Athenian statesmen averted a social revolution by successfully carrying through an economic and political revolution; and, discovering this solution of the common problem in so far as it affected themselves, they incidentally opened up a new avenue of advance for the whole of the Hellenic Society.

our explosive growth was slowing down our pace of innovation. We were spending more time coordinating and less time building. More features meant more software, written and supported by more software engineers, so both the code base and the technical staff grew continuously. Software engineers were once free to modify any section of the entire code base to independently develop, test, and immediately deploy any new features to the website. But as the number of software engineers grew, their work overlapped and intertwined until it was often difficult for teams to complete their work independently. Each overlap created one kind of dependency, which describes something one team needs but can’t supply for itself. If my team’s work requires effort from yours—whether it’s to build something new, participate, or review—you’re one of my dependencies. Conversely, if your team needs something from mine, I’m a dependency of yours. Managing dependencies requires coordination—two or more people sitting down to hash out a solution—and coordination takes time. As Amazon grew, we realized that despite our best efforts, we were spending too much time coordinating and not enough time building. That’s because, while the growth in employees was linear, the number of their possible lines of communication grew exponentially. Regardless of what form it takes—and we’ll get into the different forms in more detail shortly—every dependency creates drag. Amazon’s growing number of dependencies delayed results, increased frustration, and disempowered teams.

10 Practical Strategies to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills and Unleash Your Creativity In today's rapidly changing world, the ability to think critically and creatively has become more important than ever. Whether you're a student looking to excel academically, a professional striving for success in your career, or simply someone who wants to navigate life's challenges with confidence, developing strong critical thinking skills is crucial. In this blog post, we will explore ten practical strategies to help you improve your critical thinking abilities and unleash your creative potential. 1. Embrace open-mindedness: One of the cornerstones of critical thinking is being open to different viewpoints and perspectives. Cultivate a willingness to listen to others, consider alternative opinions, and challenge your own beliefs. This practice expands your thinking and encourages creative problem-solving. 2. Ask thought-provoking questions: Asking insightful questions is a powerful way to stimulate critical thinking. By questioning assumptions, seeking clarity, and exploring deeper meanings, you can uncover new insights and perspectives. Challenge yourself to ask thought-provoking questions regularly. 3. Practice active listening: Listening actively involves not just hearing, but also understanding, interpreting, and empathizing with the speaker. By honing your active listening skills, you can better grasp complex ideas, identify underlying assumptions, and engage in more meaningful discussions. 4. Seek diverse sources of information: Expand your knowledge base by seeking information from a wide range of sources. Engage with diverse perspectives, opinions, and ideas through books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries. This habit broadens your understanding and encourages critical thinking by exposing you to different viewpoints. 5. Develop analytical thinking skills: Analytical thinking involves breaking down complex problems into smaller components, examining relationships and patterns, and drawing logical conclusions. Enhance your analytical skills by practicing activities like puzzles, riddles, and brain teasers. This will sharpen your ability to analyze information and think critically. 6. Foster a growth mindset: A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Embracing this mindset encourages you to view challenges as opportunities for growth, rather than obstacles. By persisting through difficulties, you build resilience and enhance your critical thinking abilities. 7. Engage in collaborative problem-solving: Collaborating with others on problem-solving tasks can spark creativity and strengthen critical thinking skills. Seek out group projects, brainstorming sessions, or online forums where you can exchange ideas, challenge each other's thinking, and find innovative solutions together. 8. Practice reflective thinking: Taking time to reflect on your thoughts, actions, and experiences allows you to gain deeper insights and learn from past mistakes. Regularly engage in activities like journaling, meditation, or self-reflection exercises to develop your reflective thinking skills. This practice enhances your critical thinking abilities by promoting self-awareness and self-improvement. 9. Encourage creativity through experimentation: Creativity and critical thinking often go hand in hand. Give yourself permission to experiment and explore new ideas without fear of failure. Embrace a "what if" mindset and push the boundaries of your thinking. This willingness to take risks and think outside the box can lead to breakthroughs in critical thinking. 10. Continuously learn and adapt: Critical thinking is a skill that can be honed throughout your life. Commit to lifelong learning and seek opportunities to expand your knowledge and skills. Stay curious, be open to new experiences, and embrace change.

...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name. If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it. The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.