“God does not play dice with the universe.” So, there are limits to the paradigm-shifting prowess of even history’s heroes of invention.
In a more pragmatic realm, consider the Wright brothers, whom we explore in greater detail in chapter 4. While their invention of manned, powered flight was surely paradigm shifting, the Wright brothers followed their breakthrough with an obsessive rush to prevent further change. Masters of innovation, they succumbed to the plague of incumbency. Their breakthrough success narrowed the field of their insurgent imagination, and they became an upstart startup turned establishment incumbent, using the courts to retard the further development of aviation. Innovators they were, but the Wrights made innovation no part of their business model, which included a barrage of suits meant to tort rival innovators into submission. Their efforts set American aviation technology back twenty or thirty years.
Linear Innovation: Third—Use Agility to
Think, Act, and Plan the Future
Along with the inner conviction that you can innovate, and along with channeling Edison-style systematic innovation, today’s unprecedented business environment demands new levels of agile thinking. Progressive innovation may not aim directly at paradigm shifting, but even less does it cling to the cushy comforts of incumbency. The great University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant symbolized the requisite agile thinking when he described how he recruits great football players: “I want players who are agile, hostile, and mobile.” Agility and mobility proved vital in the building of Bryant’s 323 wins—still a record for college football.
Agile thinking, disruption, and innovation rarely emanate from the status quo. Incumbents are not structured, staffed, or motivated to “think different” precisely because they are the leaders in their categories or marketplaces. Today, change is not fundamentally critical to the incumbent’s current state of survival. They still have their yachts, to which they can retreat to count their treasure.
By contrast, as we argue in chapter 8, today’s insurgent or outsider has never had greater advantage. Because they have no legacy system or model to protect, insurgents are naturally given to agile thinking and are positioned to exploit low-overhead opportunities and the democratization of information, technologies, and platforms. They can afford to attack any market and redress any point of consumer pain. They can afford to drive change by the relative absence of other choices. They have little to lose.
Even in the apparently peaceful valley that lies between outright paradigm shifts, today’s business environment is volatile. The air of tranquility is superficial, hiding the certainty that the incumbent will be disrupted by the insurgent. Lolling on his yacht, the incumbent does not understand that he is cursed. The insurgent, meantime, burning the midnight oil in a studio apartment, relishes his great advantage. As Steve Forbes argues, “You have to disrupt yourself or others will do it for you.”
My position is that you can afford neither to embrace the status quo nor to await a paradigm shift. You must engage in a program of progressive innovation and disruption. To do this requires continually refreshing your perspectives, always putting agile thinking to work. Today’s successful leaders must be vigilant to identify new voices, questions, perspectives, passions, experiments, experts, inputs, and books.
Take, for example, the eminently agile thinking of the sometimes controversial Elon Musk, already one of history’s greatest innovators. He was once asked how he created such groundbreaking companies as SpaceX, Tesla, Inc., OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, SolarCity, Zip2, and PayPal.
“I just started reading books,” he answered.
Innovation is not “out there” any more than the next paradigm shift is “out there.” Innovation begins with innovating your own mind.
In addition to agile thinking driven by curiosity and fed by the acquisition of knowledge, innovation demands cross-disciplines, combining subject-matter expertise and approaches across and among multiple fields. Walter Isaacson, who has written bestselling biographies on innovators, credits cross-field knowledge as the commonality among the likes of Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci. Innovation demands mixing your own creative stew, thereby breaking your own status quo patterns and limiting beliefs. You cannot innovate your enterprise without innovating yourself.
But it does not come from nothing. God began (apparently in Latin) with the words Fiat lux—“Let there be light.” God is God. Edison, who was Edison, began not by creating light, but by subdividing it. Over thirty years, in focusing on ways to “think different” in terms of marketing and innovation, my own client work has always begun with one core question: “Where’s the pain?”
Whatever else you have or lack, you can own as your starting point the pain of the consumer. Identify their pain—what bothers them, what hurts them, what they miss, what they long for—address their pain, and the solution can deliver the next billion-dollar IPO to any marketplace.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, my work with some of the American firms that became the great American internet companies centered on the founders’ answers to a specific source of consumer pain. In a few cases, such as LinkedIn and Google, the answer delivered not just pain relief but a new inflection point within the business world. These were the paradigmatic movements within the rolling paradigm shift that is the digital transformation. My job was to facilitate innovation within the breakthroughs by helping CEOs and their companies reposition perspectives and change assumptions—in short, to “think different.”
Innovating your mind requires disrupting your own thinking so that you can creatively disrupt your customer’s thinking, your business model, your industry, and the competition. For example:
• Create an “A” and “B” competitive teams to test and rethink your core strategy.
• Devise a “Red Team” exercise to attack and disrupt your own best-laid plans.
• Formulate a variety of “Outsider” sourcing strategies for innovation, creativity, and imagination.
• Above all, focus on the most important consumer-focused question in business: “Where’s the pain?”
But let me pause here, because I am in danger of misleading you. You need to innovate your mind. But essential to this innovation is discovering your customer’s pain. So, this brings the number of people involved in the innovation to two: you and your customer. Still, this is not enough. One of the myths of innovation is that it is the product of some lone genius. The truth is that innovation is never solitary. At minimum, it is an action of two people: you and those whom the innovation will impact. But, as in most endeavors, the minimum is rarely sufficient. One of the fundamental realities of innovation is that innovation takes a team—and not a single-minded team. As General George S. Patton Jr. liked to say, “If everybody is thinking the same way, nobody is thinking.” Innovation requires a widely diverse team to succeed.
My first corporate client, Steve Jobs, was brilliant, no doubt, but he didn’t invent the Macintosh. He didn’t even originate the Macintosh project. Human-computer interface guru Jef Raskin started it. Jobs and Raskin, in turn, were just two members of a team of extraordinary technicians, engineers, and software developers. Jobs was a brilliant visionary, who knew what he wanted and where he needed to point his team to get there. But it was the Macintosh team that turned a disruptive vision into a technological and marketable reality.
Innovate your mind to innovate your company. We need a middle term in this formulation. Innovate your mind to innovate your team to innovate your company.
Jobs pointed his team in the direction where he wanted it to go. Do you know what direction this is? Wipe the beads of sweat off
