Quotes by Scott D. Anthony - Page 2

I'm suggesting that principles meant to deal with uncertainty that occurs naturally can be useful to manage the uncertainty that characterizes any new idea.
Scott D. Anthony /
Deals
Ideas
Principles
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The school at which you studied - design school, disruptive school, TRIZ school, user-centered innovation school, etc - determines the specific words you use.
Scott D. Anthony /
Design
Innovation
School
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Anytime you see a constrained market, where consumption is limited to those who have special skills or are wealthy, that signals an opportunity for innovation.
Scott D. Anthony /
Opportunity
Innovation
Skills
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In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer.
Scott D. Anthony /
Answers
Asking
Faces
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I use the term "fool's gold white space" to highlight a common problem for innovation. People see a market that doesn't exist, and assume that one should exist.
Scott D. Anthony /
Space
People
White
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The reality is customers lie - not because they want to want to deceive you, but because they don't do a good job of predicting what they will do in the future.
Scott D. Anthony /
Jobs
Lying
Reality
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The sad truth is as difficult as the first mile can be for entrepreneurs, it is doubly tough inside most large companies as innovators can face some significant headwinds.
Scott D. Anthony /
Entrepreneur
Faces
Firsts
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If you work on a new product launch, spent time in a new geography, or work to develop a completely new skill, you have no choice but to figure out new ways to solve problems.
Scott D. Anthony /
Choices
Skills
Way
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Companies get into grooves and they keep sharpening what they are doing, when in fact what they really need to do sometimes is to stop and do something completely differently.
Scott D. Anthony /
Facts
Needs
Sometimes
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The curious company studies the anomalies or the unexpected findings. The company that isn't curious ignores them or punishes people who don't do exactly what they set out to do.
Scott D. Anthony /
Anomalies
People
Unexpected
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Not only do innovators have to deal with all of the fundamental challenges of innovation, they have to do so in an environment that often is implicitly hostile towards innovation.
Scott D. Anthony /
Challenges
Innovation
Often Is
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I feel for today's leaders. I really do. They got to where they are by doing a series of jobs exceptionally well. And that doesn't help them at all with the challenges they now face.
Scott D. Anthony /
Jobs
Challenges
Leader
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All disruptive innovators make it easier and more affordable for people to do what matters to them, and follow a strategy that doesn't at first glance make sense to the market leader.
Scott D. Anthony /
Market Leaders
People
What Matters
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Everyone knows innovation involves developing unique understanding of a market, thinking expansively to develop a solution, and then finding a way to test rigorously and adapt quickly.
Scott D. Anthony /
Thinking
Understanding
Unique
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Avoiding along some dimensions is easy. Create organization space and bring in some new talent so the innate cultural resistance is less material. Unfortunately, it's rarely that easy.
Scott D. Anthony /
Space
Organization
Resistance
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You can always figure out how to deliver things in somewhat controlled situations, but when you start to get into the reality of the market you start to figure out what isn't going to work.
Scott D. Anthony /
Figures
Reality
Situation
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Think about how you will start and where you will go. Get the head with logic and the heart with visuals or stories. And think about your core customer and all the other stakeholders as well.
Scott D. Anthony /
Heart
Stories
Thinking
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Every leader needs to watch what teenagers or startup companies - or startup companies headed by teenagers - are doing today, because many of those behaviors will be mainstream behaviors tomorrow.
Scott D. Anthony /
Leader
Teenager
Watches
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You can increase the odds of spotting the weak points in your approach if you really think about the end-to-end business model you plan to follow - how you plan to create, capture, and deliver value.
Scott D. Anthony /
Odds
Thinking
Weak Points
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The number one thing I urge people to remember is it is all about being scientific about managing strategic uncertainty, while striking the important balance between being thorough and being flexible.
Scott D. Anthony /
Balance
Numbers
People
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The reality is sometimes markets don't exist for very good reasons. It might be that there isn't a deep customer need. Or the economic model is just hard to pull off. Or maybe there is a regulatory barrier.
Scott D. Anthony /
Economic Models
Needs
Reality
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One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is to embrace the idea of spurring creativity by letting hundreds of flowers bloom. I've never seen that lead to anything other than cynicism and hundreds of dead flowers.
Scott D. Anthony /
Creativity
Flower
Mistake
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Make sure that you take the time to think about how other companies might respond to your idea, both those companies already in the market you plan to target as well as others that might imagine targeting that market.
Scott D. Anthony /
Ideas
Target
Thinking
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Of course if you are launching a new business you can thinking about revenues, profits, and so on, but metrics such as customer satisfaction or employee retention might be meaningful if you are focusing more internally.
Scott D. Anthony /
Meaningful
Metrics
Thinking
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It takes a great deal of humility to recognize you have made a wrong turn on the road to successful innovation, but better to stop and try a radically different approach then to continue down the wrong route for too long.
Scott D. Anthony /
Humility
Long
Successful
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Good innovators are careful observers, network extensively, run experiments, ask lots of questions, and find ways to bring diverse ideas together. Overarching all of this is an intrinsic interest in working through puzzles.
Scott D. Anthony /
Running
Ideas
Together
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If you are a large company and you want to do something unique, you almost by definition have to tap onto the core business in some way. Otherwise you are going into a naked fight against startups, and that's just a tough place to be.
Scott D. Anthony /
Fighting
Naked
Unique
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Any leader has two jobs to do. To do what they are currently doing better and more efficiently (call this strengthening the core), and to do what they are not currently doing but will need to do in the future (call this creating the new).
Scott D. Anthony /
Jobs
Creating
Two
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If you invest the time to understand the customer better than they know themselves, if you know the things they want or need even if they can't articulate it, you can begin to develop a good sense as to where there really are unmet needs in the market.
Scott D. Anthony /
Customers
Needs
Want
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The need to be thoughtful about experiment design is particularly acute within large companies, since some of the behaviors, such as having small teams and tapping into low-cost resources to maximize flexibility, won't come naturally to many people inside huge companies.
Scott D. Anthony /
People
Team
Thoughtful
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It would be fun too to put some of the great philosophers and political scientists of the past couple centuries into a time machine, have them look at the world today, and see what they think. Imagine Schumpeter, Malthus, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, and more! That would be good fun.
Scott D. Anthony /
Couple
Fun
Past
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If you are trying to improve the performance of existing operations in known markets, it is an analytical problem where it's just a question of aligning your execution engine in the right way. If it is about creating something new and different, you can't derive the right answer analytically.
Scott D. Anthony /
Creating
Different
Trying
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Of course, it is worth it to take the time to think carefully through your assumptions, and ensure you at least have hypotheses around how you will create value. But use the analysis as a way to focus attention on the most critical assumptions, rather than spend a ton of time massaging the numbers.
Scott D. Anthony /
Focus
Numbers
Thinking
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One of the biggest mistakes large companies make is creating innovation teams that mirror all the functions of the core business. Those teams make no progress because they spent forever updating each other on what they are doing versus really crushing the most critical problems they need to address.
Scott D. Anthony /
Crush
Mistake
Team
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People will try to copy what they can see, which is the final product or service, but it's much harder to see (and copy) all the intricacies of the business model that allows you to create, capture, and deliver value. And that's what you need to get right to really jam something down people's throats!
Scott D. Anthony /
Finals
People
Trying
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There is what Steve Blank calls the stage where you are searching for a scalable business model. Then, there is the stage when you have found that model and need to scale it. In the former stage you have to have a "beginner's mind," be in learning mode, and expect to learn things you didn't anticipate.
Scott D. Anthony /
Beginners
Mind
Needs
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We've got some great big problems in our world. We have to figure out how to feed 10 billion people. Too many people can't access clean water, quality healthcare, and reasonable education. We have to figure out what to do about climate change, income inequality, and more. Innovators need to rise to the challenge!
Scott D. Anthony /
Our World
People
Water
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I find social media as fun and engaging as the next person, but imagine if all the creative talent that was pouring into finding increasingly clever ways for us to broadcast daily banality (and then serve ads based on what is learned) instead focused on some of the UN Millennium goals? The world would be a better place.
Scott D. Anthony /
Clever
Fun
Media
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When we are looking at ideas, we really are thinking of three things. Are you doing something that seems consistent with the patterns of success? Are there reasons to believe you have or can access the right people to make it happen? Can we play a unique role in enabling success? We all have our rules of thumb, I suppose.
Scott D. Anthony /
Believe
Thinking
Unique
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Bring different groups together internally, send them out to visit other companies, or bring in interesting speeches. Show that you love learning by having people on staff whose job it is to explore without any near-term metrics. Publicly shut a project down and talk about what a great job a team did because they learned so much. And so on.
Scott D. Anthony /
Jobs
Interesting
Team
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It's one of the underappreciated skills required by an innovator - they have to be able to convince lots of people to do things that might not be fully rational (invest in the company, join something that is likely to fail, try a product they've never seen before), and if you can't tell a good story it is just very hard to make that happen.
Scott D. Anthony /
People
Skills
Trying
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In the strengthening the core job, a leader can draw on their past experiences. After all, in most cases they did the job of the people that are reporting to them! So they know when something is screwed up, they know the risks worth taking, and they know the corners to cut. But when they are creating the new, no one knows what the right answer is.
Scott D. Anthony /
Jobs
Cutting
Past
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The CEO should ask what he or she can do to raise the organization's curiosity quotient. One way to do this is to seek to learn more about current or prospective customers, not to figure out which segmentation model to slot them into, but to really understand them as human beings. Another is to live at the intersections where innovation magic occurs.
Scott D. Anthony /
Curiosity
Innovation
Organization
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First you document your idea. You should be comprehensive, but that doesn't mean you have to produce a doctoral thesis length plan. Rather you want to make sure you have touched all the different things that have to happen to succeed. Then, you evaluate your approach. The goal here isn't to figure out if your idea is good or bad, but rather to begin to figure out what are some of its weakest elements.
Scott D. Anthony /
Goal
Ideas
Mean
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History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that's penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational.
Scott D. Anthony /
Vacation
Character
Real
Team
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In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer. The decision-making systems here are meant to deal with the reality that decisions about innovative ideas will rely on patterns and intuitions. The best venture capital organizations deal with this challenge by staging investment, actively participating in startups they fund, tying decisions to learning as opposed to artificial dates on the calendar, and assembling a diverse team of decision-makers.
Scott D. Anthony /
Organization
Reality
Team
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