The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that, unless you can express an idea clearly, you don’t really understand it yourself. His point was knowledge only has value if it’s explicit. We may act on vague notions and gut impulses, but that doesn’t mean we’re really thinking things through.
Fareed Zakaria seems to agree. As he noted in a recent article, “Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them”.
“Whether you’re a novelist, a businessman, a marketing consultant or a historian,” he continues, “writing forces you to make choices and it brings clarity and order to your ideas.” Zakaria also points to Jeff Bezos’ emphasis on memo writing as an example of how clarity of expression leads to innovation. Here are four simple rules that will help you write better.
In a classic Harvard Business Review article, Abraham Zaleznick contrasted two very different styles of authority. Managers he argued, take a rational approach and seek order and control. Leaders, on the other hand, are more emotionally driven and seek to drive change.
Every organization needs both. Managers provide the continuity needed to execute efficiently and leaders drive the kinetic energy needed to respond dynamically to the needs of the marketplace. The best CEOs, like Steve Jobs and A.G. Lafley, are both great managers and great leaders.
These days, however, crucial resources and capabilities often lay outside of an organization. That means that, to compete effectively, enterprises need to leverage platforms in order to access ecosystems, so the ability to manage operations and the capacity to inspire employees only goes so far. Today, we must learn how to shape networks around a shared purpose.
In The Innovator’s Solution, Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen argued that, during the early stages of an industry, firms with wholly proprietary products have the advantage. New technology is always glitchy, so engineering the entire architecture is the best way to ensure quality.
However, as an industry matures and the technology becomes better understood, it inevitably becomes more modular, with different firms specializing in different parts of the value chain. That’s when the true potential of a technology is unlocked, empowering an entirely new era of value creation.
The computer industry is a good example of Christensen’s model at work. Before the PC, computers were proprietary systems. Yet when the basic architecture became universal, an amazing amount of innovation was unleashed. IBM’s recent news of its commitment to the open source Apache Spark community, marks just such a point in the evolution of data.
Arthur C. Clark insisted that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yet most of us have to live in a world of practicalities. Growing up means that fantasies must give way to realities. We learn to favor probabilities over possibilities.
In other words, we learn to be reasonable. Yet as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
The modern world is one of the visceral abstract, in which unlikely ideas lead to important breakthroughs and seemingly useless things can become useful indeed. It is, as Marie Curie put it, not the practical men, but the dreamers who create new paradigms. While hard facts define today, new value is created only when the impossible becomes possible.
With 15 Academy Awards and an average worldwide gross of over $600 million per film, Pixar might just be the most successful creative enterprise ever—and one of the most profitable. Out of the 14 features the firm has produced, all but one have made the list of top 50 highest grossing animated movies.
Yet in his memoir, Creativity, Inc., Pixar founder Ed Catmull writes that “early on, all of our movies suck.” The trick, he points out, is to go beyond the initial germ of an idea and undergo the time consuming and laborious work it takes to get something “from suck to not-suck.”
That takes more than talent, it takes a deeply collaborative process that has been honed over decades. At the center of that process—and all creative processes, in fact—is productive feedback. While at most places, feedback is often a fairly informal, freewheeling exercise, at Pixar, it is a highly disciplined affair. And that, as it turns out, makes all the difference.
The idea of disruption excites some people and terrifies others. Consider the recent case of The New Republic, in which a new, disruptive CEO came in and vowed to “break shit.” The company’s top journalists balked, the brand was sullied and the business still struggles. And all for what?
That was the essence of Jill Lepore’s essay last year in The New Yorker in which she argued that, “disruptive innovation is a competitive strategy for an age seized by terror” and referred to startups as “a pack of ravenous hyenas” intent on blowing things up.
Most people over thirty have probably felt something akin to what Lepore described. Yet as I argued in my reply to Lepore, she presents a false choice between blind obedience to disruption and blind obedience to continuity. Clearly, neither is a winning strategy. In truth, successful disruption does not merely destroy, but creates a shift in mental models. read more…
From the moon landing to the decoding of the human genome, science is what made America a technological superpower. Whether it’s advanced microchips, the Internet, or miracle cures, the world looks to the U.S. for a large proportion of breakthroughs and public funding has been at the center of it all.
Yet the tide may be beginning to turn. The 21st Century Cures Act, a new bill that would restore funding to the NIH and streamline drug approvals, just passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee by a unanimous vote of 51-0. It’s about time. After over a decade of neglect, we desperately need to renew our commitment to science and competitiveness.
It’s easy to laugh off an academic squabble. When overeducated combattants square off in an arena that most people don’t even know exists, few take notice. Yet some reverberate outside the academic world and I suspect that Paul Romer’s assault on mathiness, ably summarized by Justin Fox at Bloomberg View, will be one of them.
The issue at hand is the tendency of economists to cloak ideology in obscure equations to give their views a false appearance of rigor. Well, you might say, that’s what overeducated eggheads do, but seemingly practically minded business people have their own version of “mathiness.”
When managers say they are data driven and ROI focused they are usually more intent on professing a belief than delivering results. They are, essentially, accidental theorists, putting their faith in an abstract idea rather than engaging in any true analysis of cause and effect. Despite what many will tell you, numbers can lie and only fools follow them blindly.
For a long time, TV was a fairly sleepy business. You had three major networks in the US—less elsewhere—acting as gatekeepers. They chose their programming lineup each year, which attracted a certain amount of audience that could be transformed into a certain amount of money.
Cable clouded the picture somewhat, adding subscription revenues to the mix, fragmenting audiences and giving rise to pay channels like HBO and Showtime, yet the change wasn’t drastic. You still had those who developed programs and those who distributed them, along with a few players that could do both.
Yet as I wrote two years ago, we’re entering a new age of TV where distribution is being devalued and completely new models for programming are beginning to evolve. Now, we’re approaching a tipping point where what we used to call “TV” is morphing into something else entirely. Cable providers, if they are to survive, will have to innovate their business models.
Most of the year is pretty hectic. We spend our time huddled inside, running to meetings and putting out fires. Summer, however, offers the opportunity for some relaxation. Even a few hours on the beach or by the pool can give us some much needed time to reflect on the big ideas.
But not that much time. Even in the summer, we still have responsibilities that demand our time and attention. It’s not like we’re back in college and can spend all night pushing through some massive tome, or discussing the finer points with a group of friends.
Luckily, there are some books that explain big ideas in simple, everyday language. They’re not dumbed down versions of other books, but are original, insightful and get right to the heart of the matter. So if you want to expand your mind this summer, it doesn’t have to be painful. Theses books are about powerful ideas, but are also a joy to read.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
, Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen argued that, during the early stages of an industry, firms with wholly proprietary products have the advantage. New technology is always glitchy, so engineering the entire architecture is the best way to ensure quality.
, Pixar founder 
