Notes
Chapter 1
1.‘Moonshot’ projects are inspiring, no doubt, but they’re often shots in the dark. And if you consider the original moonshot – the dramatically successful Apollo space programme – it created fewer valuable applications than the cheaper and far easier-to-build orbital launchers that give us services like GPS.
Chapter 2
1.Dryburgh, Alastair (2011) Everything You Know About Business Is Wrong: How to unstick your thinking and upgrade your rules of thumb. Headline.
Chapter 3
1.VUCA is an acronym for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. The term originated in military circles but has become popular in the business world.
2.The Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project, based at the University of Indiana, and a collaborator with The Newton Project at the University of Oxford, is devoted to the editing and exposition of Newton’s alchemical work.
3.Professor Tim Baines at Aston Business School goes further and suggests rethinking your products as a service that your customer uses up over time.
4.This may be to do with prevailing tastes or more likely because in many Asian cultures, jewellery has often been used as a store of personal wealth, in preference to an historically under-developed banking system.
5.Sutherland, Rory (2019) Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense. Virgin Digital.
6.Schwartz, Barry (2009) The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. HarperCollin.
Chapter 4
1.Dr James Wilk drew my attention to Bacon’s distinction between the realms in which our ideas either 1) bear fruit or 2) bring light. It’s invaluable to be able to shift back and forth between considering our reasons for being interested in a technology versus thinking about how that technology works in itself.
2.For example, Jay Barney (Gaining and Sustaining Competitive Advantage, Addison-Wesley (1996)) and Michael Porter (For a very clear and authoritative introduction to Porter’s work, see Understanding Michael Porter by Jean Magretta, Harvard Business Review Press (2011)).
3.The categorisation is my modification and extension of the work of Slywotsky et al. (2003). (Slywotzky, Adrian J., Wise, Richard and Weber, Karl (2003) How to Grow When Markets Don’t. Warner Books.)
Chapter 5
1.Boyd, Drew and Goldenberg, Jacob (2013) Inside The Box: A proven system of creativity for breakthrough results. Simon & Schuster.
2.Koch, Robert (2011) The 80/20 Principle: The secret of achieving more with less. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
3.Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2013) Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. Penguin.
Chapter 6
1.Goldman, William (1996) Adventures in The Screen Trade: A personal view of Hollywood. Abacus.
2.Enron was an energy trading company named by Fortune magazine as ‘America’s Most Innovative Company’ for six consecutive years. It collapsed after the discovery of a massive accounting fraud. Its 2001 bankruptcy filing was the largest in American history at the time with losses totalling around $74 billion.
3.Mintzberg, Henry (2001) How to overcome change fatigue. Harvard Management Communication Letter, Vol. 4, No. 7, July 2001.
4.Sources for these: Osterwalder & Pigneur (2010) Business Model Generation Wiley; Ash Maurya (2012) Running Lean, O’Reilly; Kaplan & Norton (2004); Strategy Maps; Tregoe and Zimmerman (1980) Top Management Strategy, Simon & Schuster.
5.This was pre-COVID-19. Since then, we’ve learned that we can do a lot of things remotely that we thought were impossible, or at least of unacceptable quality. Indeed, the COVID-19 crisis has provided many dramatic demonstrations of our ability to do more than we thought we could with what we already had.
Chapter 7
1.Some people worry that this is deceptive. I’d argue that a leader’s greater responsibility is to promote the success of the company, and that’s what will most benefit employees as well as customers and owners. The point is not to play ‘Gotcha’ – I’m certainly against that. But it’s an abdication of responsibility not to make sure you are aware of what really happens on ‘on the ground’.
2.One of the pioneers of cybernetics, the trans-disciplinary study of effective organisation, control, regulation and communication.
Chapter 8
1.This is a classic example of Frugal Innovation. See Radjou, Navi and Prabhu, Jaideep (2015) Frugal Innovation: How to do better with less. Economist Books.
2.Coram, Robert (2004) Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. Back Bay Book.
Chapter 9
1.I learned about denominalising abstract nouns from Grinder and Bandler (Bandler, Richard and Grinder, John (1975) The Structure of Magic: A Book about Language and Therapy, Volume 1. Science and Behavior Books). They present their analysis of questions asked by outstanding psychotherapists.
Chapter 10
1.This disguised example is based on a real company operating in the 1950s and 60s. While technology changes, human nature doesn’t. The example is eerily evocative of stories that came out of Boeing in the wake of the 737 Max accidents of 2018/19.
2.I originally learned the cross-pollination technique from Alan Weiss.
3.Open Space was originated by Harrison Owen, and it’s in the public domain. It’s worth reading Owen’s work if you want to get more information before trying it. While it can easily be run internally by someone who has been through the process once or twice, it’s worth hiring an experienced facilitator for the first time you do it.
1.COVID-19 has had a dramatic effect on the use of physical space by businesses. How usage will change from here is unclear. What is clear is that leaders should be thinking about how shifts online and changes in physical space usage affect relationships with customers (not to mention suppliers, partners and other stakeholders).
2.Donald Miller’s book Storybrand (Miller, Donald (2017) Building a Storybrand: Clarify your message so customers will listen. HarperCollins Leadership) clearly lays out this idea from a brand positioning point of view.
3.All this may actually have become easier since the COVD-19 crisis. Boundaries between customers, employees and senior leaders need not be as solid as they once were with everyone so clearly just a video call away.
Chapter 12
1.For more on responsabilisation, see Harnessing Everyday Genius by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, Harvard Business Review July–August 2020 Issue. And Explainer: Michelin’s ‘responsabilisation’, FT.com
2.This idea was pioneered by Robert Schaffer who discussed it in a number of books and articles including High Impact Consulting (Schaffer, Robert H. (2002) High-impact Consulting: How clients and consultants can leverage rapid results into long-term gains, Wiley.).
Chapter 13
1.Guardian 19 May 2017.
2.While alchemists’ ideas about the mechanisms involved aren’t borne out by modern science, it turns that there certainly are natural processes that can be accelerated to their end point under the right circumstances – in fact that’s exactly the purpose of a catalyst.
Chapter 14
1.Dilts, Robert (2017) Visionary Leadership Skills: Creating a world to which people want to belong. Dilts Strategy Group.