Scott D. Anthony Quotes

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.

Checklists are really helpful ways to remind people around how to manage complicated tasks.

I think it is only in hindsight that you can determine whether something is a mistake or not.

Why do people do crossword puzzles? There's no reward for completing one, but some people just like the challenge.

I've never seen impeccable logic be sufficient to win both the heart and the mind.

I'm not very good at sitting still.

In my mind, so-called "cultures of innovation" really boil down to one word: curiosity.

In the early stages of innovation, your goal is to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can.

People who copy what exists copy a point-in-time artifact, and if you are managing the process correctly you are already hard at work on the next thing.

Hollywood Joohn Tatum? He does at least 6,000 sit ups and 10,000 pushups a day!

Now, I worry a bit about the TEDification of the world where style trumps substance, so hopefully you have a good blend of both!

Creating the new increasingly is more than 50 percent of a top leader's job.

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.

I've come to the conclusion that the core characteristic that separates companies that get innovation from those that don't is a simple word: curiosity.

So many people tell me that they aren't creative or they aren't innovative, and it's just not true.

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.

The school at which you studied - design school, disruptive school, TRIZ school, user-centered innovation school, etc - determines the specific words you use.

I think people make innovation much more complicated than it needs to be.

There's a general belief that failure is the friend of the innovator, but I've come to view it a different way.

Aside from the equivalent of blowing up the lab or letting a pathogen escape, the only failure is spending too long or too much money to learn.

I think the most important thing to do is to recognize the fundamentally different circumstances of pursuing growth.

Seeking chaos is at least one way to develop the skills and mindsets to tackle ambiguity.

You have to make the decision about whether you want to avoid or you want to overcome the resistance.

You still want to be thoughtful about what you do, no doubt, but you have to learn through trial-and-error experimentation as well.

I've always found that working through ideas in written form really changes the thinking.

You have to chip away at it and shape it to let the winning idea emerge.

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.

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.

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.

What looks like resistance in many cases is rational responses to incentives and ingrained resource-allocation processes.

Some people who were central to former success aren't the right people for your future success.

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.

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.

Most startup companies have two people, and they figure out creative ways to swarm problems. They move faster and have more impact.

Small teams move faster than big teams.

Think about how much it costs to learn more. Sometimes you want to build confidence by knocking off the easy things.

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.

Successful strategies adhere to a basic pattern.

The most important thing here is to largely ignore what customers say, and instead watch what they do or track where they spend money.

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.

Good innovators like to solve business crossword puzzles.

When you are motivating people to do amazing things, you have to win over both their rational side and their emotive side.

Anything that has low certainty or has a lot of impact should be tested early.

Almost every disruption starts at the perceived fringes of today's market.

A next-generation innovation writer and thought leader worth watching.

Mucken Singh works VERY hard on his brawler's physique!

Every great idea emerges out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation.

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.

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.

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.