Phil Knight's "Shoe Dog" has to be one of the best memoirs on entrepreneurship on the market. It's filled with reasons not to do something as crazy as start a company. But lest I digress, I wanted to mention what I consider to be Nike's secret weapon: Bill Bowerman's insatiable desire for victory on the track, and in particular, his willingness to experiment wildly to achieve it. He may be the quintessential example of "ideaction" embodied in a single individual. As Oregon's track coach, he had access to a "laboratory" of sorts: his athletes and their performance. But the thing that distinguishes him in my mind is the relentlessness and precision with which he experimented on his team's footwear in search of an edge…

Did you know that a classic innovation that reinvented the athletic shoe category came from gazing upon a kitchen appliance? Much like Apple's Steve Jobs was inspired by Cuisinart, Nike had its own flash of inspiration - albeit in the grip of a different appliance. The two stories that follow taken from the exceptionally-entertaining, "Shoe Dog," by Nike's creator, Phil Knight…

"Dr. Smithies was meticulous about his work… the only exceptions were what he called his Saturday morning experiments. 'On Saturday mornings, you can do whatever you want.' He felt free to doodle, like a child with finger paints, to have fun and to free his imagination…”

\ ˌī-dē-ˈāk-shən \

the state where the friction between having an idea and taking action upon it has been so reduced that the two become a singular event, rather than disparate activities…

"The year is 2030. The Wall Street Journal has just announced that (company), whose stock fell below asset values, has gone bankrupt and is being sold off piece by piece. Your job is to write the article…

We are all familiar with FOMO. The Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) can be a tremendous catalyst for change and reinvention. There are many cataclysmic shifts coming down the pike, and they have profound implications for incumbents (this nice deck was shared among my network recently). Visionary leaders seek to harness these changes, and ride them as waves into accelerated growth opportunities…

Over the weekend I remembered a relevant post-script to my post on analogies last week. This one sheds light on what kinds of analogies yield the biggest impact in terms of idea generation potential…

What do you do when you encounter a seemingly-unsolvable problem? Do you have a go-to technique that helps you break through? Please consider the following anecdote (known as Dunker's Radiation Problem, originally developed in the 1930's) that keeps cropping up in my research. It highlights a technique that our students have found enormously value. (This particular version is taken from Dave Epstein's "Range"…

I remember the first time I met Roger Martin. We were both delivering "keynote addresses" to a gathering of hundreds of business leaders at a conference in Philadelphia. He was so smart! Had so many great things to say! No wonder he was the headliner…

Self-censorship is a classic creativity pitfall. It's natural to attempt to multi-task when coming up with new ideas: to generate, and simultaneously evaluate, the material we come up with. But experience and research both suggest that such tasks should be separated. It can be painful to deliberately defer judgment, but such discipline pays off…

Did you know that your teenager wasn't the first person to cleverly fool a live zoom call? That distinction belongs to Rudi Kompfner, a brilliant Bell Labs engineer who fifty years ago hacked one of the most hailed technological advances of the day by "positioning a still photograph of himself in front of his Picturephone (the image showed Kompfner to be remarkably attentive and invariably interested in whatever was being said) so that he could move about his office during a chat." (This story, and all quotes below, from "The Idea Factory"…

I was struck by this story about Bill Baker, the head of Bell Labs' research division, and a simple daily practice he employed to fuel his own creative practice.

"Every day at lunch he would sit down with the first person he spotted in the cafeteria, whether he was a glassblower from the vacuum tube shop or a metallurgist from the semiconductor lab -- 'Is it okay if I join you?' he would ask politely, never to be refused -- and would gently interview the employee about his work and personal life and ideas. 'At the end of any conversation,' Baker's friend and colleague Mike Noll recalls, 'you would then realize that he knew everything about you but you would know absolutely nothing about him…

What drove Apple to invent the iPhone? According to insiders, it was the phenomenal success of the iPod, and the potential vulnerability to disruption that that success presented…

Apple's ability to capitalize on the breakthroughs of Xerox PARC is fairly well documented. Not that they're the only ones who did so... In fact, when Steve Jobs angrily summoned Bill Gates to Cupertino to vent about Microsoft's newly rendered graphical user interface in a non-Apple product, in a software called "Windows," Gates' reply is telling…

A former student, now longtime friend, recommended “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character. What a fun read! It's the most un-scientific book I've ever read by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (the only other being Einstein's attempt at a layman's description of general relativity, which went over my head completely 😜)…

The gist of the origin of the Post-It Note, is that a 3M engineer found himself daydreaming during a particularly boring sermon and, by making an unexpected connection between a seemingly-irrelevant technology and an irritating private-life annoyance, stumbled across one of the most widely adopted new product innovations of the last 50 years.

As it turns out, apparently there's an empirical foundation for the daydream-to-insight loop…

I just finished a product sprint with Prof G. His associate, NYU Professor Adam Alter, recommends auditing the points of friction in any product or service, as removing friction is a great way to improve the experience and retention. For example, when Neflix auto-plays the next episode, they remove friction; when Uber auto-pays at the end of the ride, they remove friction; when Amazon Go stores allow you to walk out of the store without a point of sale, they remove friction. You get the idea. (More on that subject here, if you're curious - the word was really just my jumping-off point…

One simple way to identify potential founders-in-residence inside of an organization ("intrapraneurs") is to look for the people who can't leave well enough alone. Who are the folks who just won't let an idea die, who come in to tinker after hours, who are using the lab equipment on the weekends, etc. Those folks are a nice group to consider. Some are lunatics, but some of those lunatics are right…

I just got off of a particularly brutal call with a mentor who is pushing me to shift gears a little bit more radically than my comfort zone enjoys. And that, coupled with the recent post on complimentary collaborators, reminded me of a couple of important functions that others can play in sparking fresh thinking…