Pithy text message at the end of a grueling workout: "Experiment: I'm opening a Clubhouse room about our class at Stanford to see if anybody wants to talk about it. Hop on for a few?" And with that paltry provisioning, a co-instructor got me to jump into a new app, talking to a "room" full of strangers, right after I'd finished a workout and was still covered with sweat, with absolutely zero notice - something I would never have agreed to in advance…

My friend Mar Hershenson and I have been speaking with some amazing female founders lately. In a recent conversation, Mar asked a spectacular question that led to a profound insight: "I hear from a lot of female founders that they struggle with imposter syndrome. How have you interacted with feeling like you don't belong, like you're out of place?"

Shortly after I wrote yesterday's post about the Toy Story 3 team at Pixar, a longtime friend and mentor sent me Mark Rober's TED Talk, "The Super Mario Effect". I'd seen it a while ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I almost archived the message without much thought; but his email made me curious to review it, and I'm glad I did! 

I was blown away by this short anecdote, which not only encapsulates a special aspect of Pixar's culture, but also sets a high water mark for the ambitions any leader could hope to instill in a creative team…

Jim March is a legendary organizational theorist* who posited that organizations create value (or "new knowledge") in one of two ways: either by exploring new possibilities or exploiting old certainties (ie executing known opportunities with known resources). His research dealt with how to balance the tradeoffs inherent in larger organizations seeking to do a bit of both, as they generally compete for the same pool of scarce resources…

"We had made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the organizational structure," says Pixar's Ed Catmull, in his fantastic memoir, Creativity, Inc. He's describing the source of the tension that threatened to drive a wedge into the heart of the organization after the spectacular last-minute rescue of Toy Story 2. Efforts to protect folks' attention resulted in stultifying red tape that impeded the free flow of ideas and communication, the beating heart of the creative team…

I've noticed a fascinating pattern that, when solving a problem, my default orientation is towards quality: "I just need a good idea." I don't realize I'm thinking this way, but I often am. And realizing it is the first step to a solution…

Mark Parker, former CEO and now Executive Chairman of Nike, is in the pantheon of Steve Jobs when it comes to design-forward innovation. He's one of the few designers to drive innovation at the level that he did from the chief spot…

Arthur Koestler defined creativity, “The collision of two apparently unrelated frames of reference.” Collisions, or connections more broadly, often get the spotlight when it comes to creative thinking. But what enables unexpected connections?

The fundamental atomic structure of an innovation is comprised of at least two molecules: the idea and the founder. While these two are inseparably linked, the natural tendency is to overly-fixate upon the idea side of the compound…

Acclaimed HBS Professor Linda Hill makes a regular practice of choosing a particularly promising 22 year old to co-author her books with her. Talk about appreciating the perspective of a novice!…

What do soap operas, Chuck-E-Cheese, and the Michelin Guide have in common? They've all got unexpected origin stories, originally developed as products to help sell other products, that became innovations in their own right...

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…”

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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…