they were, Jean-Claude Killy and Daley Thompson used the power of visualization, the fuel of imagination, to give them the enduring self-confidence to face rejection after rejection. Innovators need thick skin to overcome the impostor syndrome by visualizing and believing in their own success. Knocked down, they see themselves getting up off the floor—and then they do just that.
Consider, for example, the number of times the founders of the following companies pitched investors before finally securing funding for their innovations:
• Skype 40
• Cisco 76
• Pandora 300
• Google 350
Or consider the 302 rejections Roy Disney received from the banks he approached to fund his “new” amusement park, Disneyland. Or the Social Security check sixty-five-year-old Colonel Sanders cashed, which led him to pledge prophetically to himself: “I’m going to build something new with my life, I’m going to create something called ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken.’ ”
Research shows that successful innovators deeply believe three things:
• First, innovation is there—it exists or will exist.
• Second, innovation must and will be found.
• Third, innovation will be worth it once it is found.
Invariably, all three of these core beliefs are a part of innovation success—an inner belief that innovation can happen, will happen, and will be worth the journey. In fact, this inner belief—and the leader’s ability to cascade and leverage it within the organization—has never been more important in creating and sustaining a culture of innovation and a successful business. Put another way, the ability to leverage belief is the minimal requirement to advancing leadership, company, and product breakthroughs and doing what it takes to grow a business: increasing the number of customers, the average transaction value, and the frequency of repurchase. It is essential to what pioneering marketer Sergio Zyman described as the job of marketing and innovation: “Sell more stuff, to more people, more often, for more money, more efficiently.”
Leveraging belief strips away the impostor syndrome and commits to an insurgent way of thinking about playing offense and driving innovation forward. Or else. At key times, this means channeling the do-or-die analogy constructed by Napoleon Hill in his 1937 classic, Think and Grow Rich. Hill applied the lessons of Conquistador Hernán Cortés. Back in 1519, as he landed on the shores of Mexico’s Yucatan, he knew the odds were against him. He had to convince his crew of 600 sailors and soldiers that he truly believed and that they must as well. So, he scuttled his ships. With no means of turning back, there was no choice but to believe in victory. As Hill puts it:
A long while ago, a great warrior faced a situation which made it necessary for him to make a decision which insured his success on the battlefield.… Addressing his men before the first battle, he said, “You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win! We now have no choice—we win, or we perish!” They won. Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat. Only by so doing can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win, essential to success.
Linear Innovation:
Second—Think Innovation Not Invention
Sergio Zyman constructed a wonderfully fresh approach to innovation in his 2004 book, Renovate Before You Innovate: Why Doing the New Thing Might Not Be the Right Thing. Too often, Zyman argues, the conventional quest for innovation amounts to a search for a shiny new object. Or, as Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, puts it on the inside cover of Zyman’s book: “Management thinkers, business writers, and global executives have too long been infatuated with the Next Big Thing. But the next thing is not always big and the big thing is not always next.”
Extending Zyman and Moore’s argument into today’s business environment, we see that many companies habitually close their eyes and reflexively swing for the fences. They try to invent their way out of the ballpark with the Next Big Thing. In 2004, Zyman and Moore argued that such thinking is a mistake. Today, I argue it is more of a mistake than ever.
Instead of blindly swinging to invent the Next Big Thing, business leaders do better to focus on disrupting, renovating, and innovating their thinking, destination, battlefield map, attitudinal segmentation, brand positioning, customer experience, core strategy, and executional campaign. They are better off innovating rather than trying to invent their way to success.
As Kuhn might put it: Focus on “normal science,” step-by-step progress, and “puzzle-solving,” rather than “revolutionary science” and history’s oh-so-rare paradigm shifts. Instead of inventing the Next Big Thing, focus on innovating every single day.
This is what America’s most iconic “inventor,” Thomas Edison, did. His ethos of innovation—in contrast to invention—underpins our argument. Take the light bulb. The most prolific inventor of our age, Edison set out, he said, to “subdivide light.” In this quest, he was fueled by the deep-seated belief that he could really do this. But it did not take genius. Edison replaced genius—inventing something from nothing—with analogy, innovating something by spring-boarding off something else. He worked step-by-step to create the incandescent electric light. He played the part of extraordinary innovator, repeatedly. He was not sure he was an inventor, but he knew how to play the role of innovator—on demand. As we will see in the next chapter, he delivered a nearly endless series of innovations into the world. The process followed a set of doable steps. Some hit their mark, many others did not. No matter. He kept stepping, establishing with each step a vital connection between innovation and marketing.
Thomas Edison was very different from Albert Einstein, one of history’s most revolutionary thinkers. Where Edison enlarged existing paradigms, innovating upon whatever came to hand, Einstein challenged paradigms—as when he approached gravitation not as Newton’s attractive property of mass, but as a field of energy. Einstein and Edison are at opposite ends of the innovation spectrum. Einstein was a bona fide genius, a very rare force in history. Edison, by contrast, succeeded by emulating genius. He rationalized innovation, figuring out ways to furnish it on demand. For him, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” was a business model.
We live in singularly interesting times. While the spacing between paradigm shifts is likely to become compressed, the pace of business cannot await even the first signs of the next revolution. Success in business depends on moving along the spectrum of innovation closer to Edison’s evolutionary end and farther from Einstein’s revolutionary edge. The sweet spot is squarely within the space of progressive innovation rather than going all in on the next revolution. Progress is more achievable than paradigm.
Nobody, by the way, has a corner on paradigmatic thinking. Isaac Newton’s notion of gravitation as a property of matter with mass truly opened to contemplation a new universe. The idea that seemingly inert matter possessed a force of gravity was a profound paradigm shift. But could Newton have even imagined Einstein’s new paradigm, of gravity not as a force, but a field that shaped the very universe?
Paradigm shifts, like revolutions, end. Even Einstein’s undoubted genius for invention had bounds. The paradigm he shifted he could shift only so far. He imagined much that defies imagining—the equivalence of mass and energy, the gravitational field, and the space-time continuum—but paradigm became wall when it confronted the emerging science of quantum mechanics, especially “entanglement,” the quantum theory that entangled subatomic particles remain connected so that actions performed on one particle affect another, even when separated by vast distances. Until
