“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas,” said the computing pioneer Howard Aiken. “If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” The truth is that innovation needs combination and few ideas can make much of an impact alone. So if you want your ideas to amount to…
We’re often faced with complex, seemingly insurmountable problems. One surprising effective technique to get at root causes and start actually solving them is called the “5 Whys.” Watch this video to learn how it works. For more, check out my blog post on Digital Tonto: The Power of Asking Why
At Google’s X division, the company’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is “#MonkeyFirst.” The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you’d better start by training the monkey, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can build a pedestal. To learn…
Many believe you have to be a jerk to be a great innovator, but in my research I found just the opposite. Sharing ideas and insights helps you build a strong network of others that are willing to share with you. That gives you a much larger knowledge base that you can use to solve…