In other words, companies aren’t born in garages. Companies are born in companies. (Location 42)
As stories are told and retold, they evolve. They come to emphasize individuals, not organizations; to celebrate a flash of insight over stepwise improvements; and to exaggerate obstacles while downplaying institutional support. (Location 56)
But if you’re starting a company or launching a product, don’t get lured into scouting out a garage. Learn from your predecessors: First, get a job. (Location 59)
That’s what sticky ideas do – they make people feel something. Change comes from feeling, not facts. (Location 71)
Should we demonize coffee, too? Well, as a thought experiment, imagine that you’re in the office kitchen as a colleague adds some sugar to his coffee. As you watch, he adds a teaspoon. And then another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. Absurd, right? Nope, that’s the amount of sugar that’s in a 20-ounce soda. Except add another half-teaspoon. (Location 87)
Note: Haha
This is an economic issue as well as an emotional one: In a survey of 10,000 employees from the 1,000 largest companies, 40% of workers cited “lack of recognition” as a key reason for leaving a job. (Location 119)
In her book The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, describes a dozen scientifically proven strategies to make yourself happier. The first? Expressing gratitude. (Location 122)
“Overwhelming evidence proves the failure of the for-profit mutual-fund industry,” says David F. Swensen in his revealing book Unconventional Success. (Location 165)
We can’t handle the truth that the robot beats the Ivy League MBAs. Even when the MBAs manage to outperform the robot, you might still come out behind, because of the fees they charge. (Location 175)
But what if talent is more like an orchid, thriving in certain environments and dying in others? (Location 204)
We are salad people in the future and Cheetos people in the moment. (Location 271)
People need help saving themselves from themselves, and that presents a business opportunity. (Location 272)
Incentives are dangerous, and not just because people game them. They often yield collateral damage. (Location 337)
Incentives are like that jet engine. There’s no question the engine will take you somewhere, fast, but it’s not always clear where. (Location 338)
In your complicated, squishy, matrixed world, if you’re dreaming up an incentive plan, you’re almost certainly in the grips of a focusing illusion. (Location 368)
Marketers deliberately construct stigmas for the sake of selling you a solution to the ensuing embarrassment and disgust. They smack you on the head so they can sell you an aspirin for the headache. Why do we put up with this? (Location 388)
Stigmas breed self-censorship. (Location 412)
Stigma should be reserved for people who violate community standards, like people who willfully park in handicap spots. It shouldn’t be used as a way to peddle new products for private benefit. (Location 416)
How do you spread a new idea – fast – and get people to pay attention? Innovations require lots of explaining. (We just spent one-third of this column laying out the CPR case.) Explanations require lots of attention, but attention is scarce. So don’t explain. Instead, anchor in what people already know. (Location 436)
Breakthrough technologies often need an anchor so customers can grasp them. (Location 446)
The only downside to anchoring is that, by hooking into existing ideas, it creates sameness. (Location 458)
That’s why a good innovation story couples an anchor with a twist. (Location 461)
After every client meeting, the staff holds a debriefing, modeled on the Army’s after-action reviews. People give each other feedback, offering at least one positive example and one concrete suggestion about how to improve. (Location 502)
So when you evaluate the next big thing, ask the Christensen question: What job is it designed to do? Most successful innovations perform a clear duty. When we craved on-the-go access to our music collections, we hired the iPod. When we needed quick and effective searches, we hired Google. And looking ahead, it’s easy to see the job that Square will perform: Giving people an easy, inexpensive way to collect money in the offline world. (Location 550)
Zhong concluded that “deliberative processes can license morally questionable behaviors by focusing on tangible monetary outcomes and reducing emotional influence.” If only such behavior were limited to the lab. (Location 577)
When you’re getting rich, it’s pretty easy to soothe the ol’ gut. If you need a rationalization, your mind will provide one. (Location 588)
Guts aren’t perfect. For instance, we tend to feel so much empathy for individuals that it can doom our efforts to be impartial and consistent. But in the business world, we’ve tipped too far toward pure rationality. We need an emotional counterweight – and we already have it. When you’re in an ethically loaded situation and your gut talks, listen to it. (Location 605)
As we’ve seen, a well-constructed box can help people generate new ideas. (Location 636)
Research tells us that brainstorming becomes more productive when it’s focused. As jazz great Charles Mingus famously said, “You can’t improvise on nothing, man; you’ve gotta improvise on something.” (Location 638)
The paradox is that while specificity narrows the number of paths that the improv could take, it makes it easier for the other actors to come up with the next riff. (Location 646)
So don’t think out of the box. Go box shopping. Keep trying on one after another until you find the one that catalyzes your thinking. A good box is like a lane marker on the highway: It’s a constraint that liberates. (Location 654)
Products make the leap from pedestrian to premium when their creators think of them as ideas. Some products are heavy on ideas: perfume, spa treatments, life coaching, alcohol. Others are practically idea-free: mailboxes, fax machines, oil changes. Notice anything about those two sets of goods? You make mega-margins on the first and mini-margins on the second. Margins feed on ideas. (Location 663)
Part of the underlying reason for consumers being more receptive to this morphing of products into ideas is that our concept of luxury has evolved. Luxury has become more about personal pleasure and self-expression and less about status. (Location 675)
Luxury goods are no longer a sign of status; they’re the mark of connoisseurship. (Location 681)
But we haven’t completely left behind the status era, because connoisseurship only works when you are recognized as a connoisseur. (Location 685)
A connoisseur lives to be recognized by fellow aficionados. Kindred spirits can only recognize each other, though, if the product allows some “signal” that insiders can notice, such as the subtle back-pockets of ultra-premium jeans that can only be decoded by other connoisseurs. (Location 687)
Big numbers fuzz our brains, and that is just as true in business as it is in public policy. Speaking in “millions” and “billions” is like your second year of Spanish: You’ve memorized the vocabulary, but it’s hard to think in the language. The challenge of communicating the significance of numbers – and acting on them – is to find ways to bring them closer to people’s day-to-day experience. (Location 709)
Putting a number in a day-to-day context is critical. (Location 721)
A good statistic is one that aids a decision or shapes an opinion. For a stat to do either of those, it must be dragged within the everyday. That’s your job – to do the dragging. In our world of billions and trillions, that can be a lot of manual labor. But it’s worth it: A number people can grasp is a number that can make a difference. (Location 743)
Herndon’s willingness to withstand such a slog in a challenging environment is an undeniable showcase of “grit.” In fact, new psychological research suggests that grit – defined as endurance in pursuit of long-term goals and an ability to persist in the face of adversity – is a key part of what makes people successful. In a culture that values quick results – this quarter’s numbers, this week’s weight loss, this month’s click-throughs – grit can be an underappreciated secret weapon. (Location 764)
Grit is not synonymous with hard work. It involves a certain single-mindedness. An ungritty prison inmate will formulate a new plan of escape every month, but a gritty prison inmate will tunnel his way out one spoonful of concrete at a time. (Location 777)
Grit is often undervalued in business, because businesspeople adore breakthroughs, which are good ideas that you’ll have next week. (Location 779)
Grit is tough because you don’t get the psychic payoffs that come with an exciting discovery or a shift in direction. You rarely get big wins to celebrate. In fact, you may never truly win. You will never have a web page that loads instantaneously or a state with no smokers. All you can do is shave a few seconds off a load time or persuade a few more rural school districts to join your campaign. And that slow, inch-by-inch progress? It’s called winning. (Location 796)