whether the relentless emphasis on efficiency had made 3M a less creative company. That's a vitally important issue for a company whose very identity is built on innovation. After all, 3M is the birthplace of masking tape, Thinsulate, and the Post-it note

Efficiency programs such as Six Sigma are designed to identify problems in work processes—and then use rigorous measurement to reduce variation and eliminate defects. When these types of initiatives become ingrained in a company's culture, as they did at 3M, creativity can easily get squelched. After all, a breakthrough innovation is something that challenges existing procedures and norms. "Invention is by its very nature a disorderly process," says current CEO George Buckley, who has dialed back many of McNerney's initiatives. "You can't put a Six Sigma process into that area and say, well, I'm getting behind on invention, so I'm going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday. That's not how creativity works." McNerney declined to comment for this story.

The results show that while the success rates of traditional innovation processes average 17 percent,

includes traditional success rates and sources.

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

“Hackers Believe Something Can Always Be Better

The story of every company begins with a clever hack.

”The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.

HBR article

great case studies: iPhone vs blackberry, apple vs sony

can be overlaid on the flux flex model?? Very robust - observationally based. Phenomenological.

business analysts - high tolerance for ambiguity, pulling order from chaos and synthesising masses of complex info
project management - low tolerance - needs to get things done
Distinction b/w ambiguity and uncertainty

downloaded on hard drive

ideas + energy = change
Videos and lectures on change and innovatioin

the concept of “Trojan mice”, which I found inspiring for anyone trying to introduce ideas to an organization or a market.
rather than pursue the initiative all at once, he introduced Trojan mice, small-start slivers of the big idea.

lots of companies: GE, BMW etc purchase

Morale - ROI - biggest impact on a movies's budet. Low= 25c to the dollar, high = $3 for every dollar. In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

I would say that involved people make for better innovation. Passionate involvement can make you happy, sometimes, and miserable other times. You want people to be involved and engaged. Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.

Clearly, Pixar tries to improve creative decisions through multiple means. Individuals still have an important role, but their individual judgment is enhanced by organizational judgment.
directors have lots of autonomy
lots of feedback
postmortems
mistakes - will scrap if not working
education - pixar university

Pixar cofounder and President Ed Catmull describes Pixar's creative process as "going from suck to nonsuck."
That's because Catmull and Pixar's directors think it's better to fix problems than to prevent errors. "My strategy has always been: be wrong as fast as we can," says Andrew Stanton, Director of Finding Nemo and WALL-E, "Which basically means, we're gonna screw up, let's just admit that. Let's not be afraid of that." We can all work this way more often.

rapid prototyping. using the printing machine. tech dvpt

Beware of innovation's hidden enemies; they are often the offspring of good management practices such as market research policies, the resource allocation process, the business unit and product organization structure; and the strategic planning process. Unless you identify these issues early and figure out how to work around them, your company will never be able to benefit from all its ideas.

The overall project shows many innovations and significant risk taken by the company. It also shows the persistence of Nestlé, or rather of some Nestlé managers, in the face of persistent skepticism and negative market feedback: 21 years of failures, and each and every year the company soldiers on. 21 years, for a coffee machine! But 21 years giving way to one of the most successful and profitable products in the history of Nestlé. In the first semester of 2009, at the heart of the world recession and despite competition from Senseo and Tassimo for instance, Nespresso sales grew by 25%.

The missing ingredient is building a bridge between aspirations and reality. The greatest leaders bridge these two realms, and in the process, change the world.Most people think leadership is all about the aspirational world–but that’s only half the story. The other is “reality.”

Geoff bezos Amazon innovation. Bet early on lots of stuff so you don't have to bet the company.

paean to piracy passion and purpose. Brilliant