<ul>
<li>As a young manager, observe and do everything to learn various aspects.</li>
<li>The first 10 years of your career is too crucial & that’s where you learn all the stuff. Thus it’s important that you focus on getting the right kind of learning.</li>
<li>To make a better decision, keep asking yourself “What should be happening in your career/start-up in the next 5 years”. </li>
<li>This might sound like a theory to you or you probably have heard from yogis to practice living in the moment. But that doesn’t mean you should not try to foresee or plan where you want to go and how you can probably reach out there.</li>
</ul>

Advice For Young Managers

Outsiders should understand that it’s not their company. This means to avoid being the face of the company or getting media coverage. That’s what Eric did when he was leading Google and Larry Page, Sergey Brin. He focused on running the company & making it profitable leaving Larry & Sergey to be the face of it.

A CEO Who Is Not A Founder But An Outsider

The way you build great products is by building a small team, working really hard, pushing the team & getting the product out which just barely works.  Example: The original iPod just barely worked initially. From there, Apple improved it before it was taken to the mass market. As a founder, you have to have a judgment when your product & start-up is ready to scale.

Building Great Products Is A Long Game

Great products are built from self-use. As a founder, you know whether your product really works or not. And if you don’t know, get the data from your initial set of customers and analyze it. Making sure your product works before you take VC money and start expanding in all directions.

Self Usage: Eating Your Own Dog Food

<ul><li>Hire intelligence over experience.</li><li>Take your time to hire the right guys. And if things are not working with new hires even after doing multiple interventions, fire them fast.</li><li>Sell your dream to prospective candidates. Hire those to whom it makes sense. .</li><li>Hire ordinary people who have done extraordinary things.</li><li>Hire people who can work better in teams. Give a person an exception to be an individual contributor if she is an exceptional talent.</li><li>On the finance side, hire CFOs who have gone bankrupt because they have seen what should not be done to become bankrupt.</li></ul>

Hiring Tips From Eric Schmidt

Next generation of successful programmers will be those who can write programs such that software themselves can learn how to solve a problem. This is also called machine learning.

Machine Learning

In every successful company, you have got a core team with following qualities:<ul><li>The one who has very good product sense.</li><li>The one who has emotional intelligence for all the stakeholders.</li><li>And the one who knows who to make people move fast.</li></ul>

A Successful Company

Three pointers for entrepreneurs who want to build a great company: <ul><li>Have an incredible founding team & right founders to address right kind of problem</li><li>You need to have some luck</li><li>Passion, lots of hard work and hiring awesome people</li></ul>

Advice To Entrepreneurs

Advice to Young Managers and Leaders By Eric Schmidt

This is session 8 of Technology-enabled Blitzscaling, a Stanford University class taught by Reid Hoffman, John Lilly, Allen Blue, and Chris Yeh. This class features Reid Hoffman interviewing Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc. (formerly Google).

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Career

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Technology & The Future

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Startups

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Podcasts

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Leadership & Management

This is session 8 of Technology-enabled Blitzscaling, a Stanford University class taught by Reid Hoffman, John Lilly, Allen Blue, and Chris Yeh. This class features Reid Hoffman interviewing Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc. (formerly Google).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do tech startups go from idea…to iconic? Greymatter’s weekly podcast features interviews with VCs, founders, and tech visionaries on everything from AI, marketplaces, and cybersecurity as well as company-building strategies like growth, finding product-market-fit, and recruiting top talent. Founders and VCs offer candid accounts of success, failure, and adaptation. Greymatter delivers practical insights mixed with the bold optimism that defines entrepreneurship.  

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Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google | Blitzscaling 08

It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up.

"It's not whether you get knocked down, it's..." - Vince Lombardi quotes from BrainyQuote.com

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

Vince Lombardi Quotes

The research is clear about how we grow most successfully: it’s a combination of on-the-job, social, and formal learning, also known as the 70-20-10 model. This research-derived mantra says that roughly 70 percent of your professional growth will come from the work experiences you have, 20 percent will come from your interactions with others, and 10 percent will come from formal education.

The 70-20-10 model

Think of growth as a cycle — successfully perform, get feedback, and perform again even better. Experiences power that growth cycle, so you’ll want to understand which experiences matter most and gain as many of them as quickly as possible.Two key steps to grow faster are:<ul><li>Determine your from/to.</li><li>Get the experiences and create a personal experience map.</li></ul>

Think of growth as a cycle 

Use the from/to framework - two brief statements — one describing where you are today and one describing your next big (not your ultimate) destination.
Examples of great from/to statements include:
<ul>
<li>From an individual contributor who adds value through technical expertise and closely follows others’ directions, to a people leader who creates a clear strategy and delivers results through a small team.</li>
<li>From a business strategist who can appear aloof and dismissive of those with less intellectual horsepower, to a general manager who aligns and inspires her region through personal connections.</li>
</ul>

Determine your From/To

A personal experience map shows which experiences you want to acquire in the next two to five years to grow your career. It’s a practical planning document that describes how you will produce the highest-performing you.There are two types of experiences that will accelerate your development:<ul><li> Functional experiences help make you great at something, i.e. marketing, supply chain, R&D. They allow you to prove that you’re highly competent at what you do. </li><li>Management experiences will help you prove that you can perform or manage in a variety of challenging situations.</li></ul>

The personal experience map

Select four to seven functional experiences and three to four management experiences you believe will benefit you most and list them on your personal experience map. The map should be focused and realistic — a reference sheet that you’ll use regularly to plan your growth and assess your progress.The personal experience map is now your guide to continuously grow your high-performing self. Creating it will be one of your best investments of time. Review the content of your map any time you switch jobs or companies and at least every six months to ensure that it remains a current, helpful guide.

Create your personal experience map

Identify where you are and where you want to go.

A Simple Way to Map Out Your Career Ambitions

Your mindset naturally constrains your ability to consider alternatives and possibilities that go beyond the boundaries of your thinking. Your limiting assumptions can be about personal skills, team knowledge, and abilities, organizational capabilities, market needs, technology, financial limitations, partnership possibilities, competition, or just about anything else. When it comes to strategy and innovation, success depends on how fast you become aware of your assumptions and then modify them. But it's a paradox: You can't see your most fundamental assumptions until you overcome them.

Your Hidden Assumptions

When it comes to developing your strategy or innovating, get clear on what you need to know and learn. <ul><li>List up to 4-5 topics. For example, the most successful social media influencers.</li><li>For each topic, create a list of guiding questions that, if answered, would really give you a solid understanding of the area. </li></ul>This exercise will help you better understand what's most important to further explore so you can broaden your perspective.

Identify Areas of Intrigue

Find a company completely outside of your industry or market and look at what makes them different and what they do really well. Then adapt their model to your cause. 
<ul>
<li>Use the format "I want to be the \___________ of ____________" by putting a company name into the first blank and the area of your target market or innovation area into the second blank. For example, if you want to transform the fashion industry, you might try "I want to be the Netflix of fashion"_. </li>
<li>Consider companies like Starbucks, Twitter, Domino's, NIKE, Home Depot, or any other innovative company.</li>
</ul>

Adapt a Business Model

Successful strategy and innovation are about how fast you can become aware of your assumptions.

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Productivity

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Problem Solving

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Business

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Creativity

How to See Your Hidden Assumptions

Purpose matters more than ever. People who don’t feel their work contributes to their company’s mission are 630% more likely to quit their jobs than their peers who do.
The way to help employees rediscover the purpose in their work is to make every task and project mission driven. Managers can tie each team member’s work back to the bigger picture of why what they do matters to the world. When assigning tasks, managers should consistently outline answers to: Why is this project important? How will it impact others? How does it fit into the company’s broader mission?

Make work purpose driven

Encourage managers to offer direction, not directions. To help hybrid teams succeed, managers should clearly outline the milestones they’d like their reports to hit — and then let them figure out how to get there.
It feels uncomfortable at first, but by giving your team the freedom to decide their process and work product, you will end up with a better end product.

Trust your people more than feels comfortable

Hybrid work means it’s easier to miss out on the small moments that make teamwork magical and spark innovation. Google News, for example, was the result of a casual conversation between two employees standing next to each other in line for lunch. In an office, these types of interactions happen naturally; in a remote setting, they fall by the wayside and over time this is highly detrimental.
Nudges can offer an opportunity to spark these moments in a hybrid environment. You could send nudges encouraging employees to “Reach out to a team member today”, for example.

Send people — and yourself — nudges

While you should offer your people autonomy, you also shouldn’t shy away from putting a stake in the ground. When it comes to company direction, policies, and values, being clear is the kindest thing you can do — even if your decision is unpopular. 
When people know what’s happening, they can make the best choices for themselves. It’s ambiguity that is more punishing.

Provide clarity. Be more decisive than feels comfortable

Use the shift to hybrid as an opportunity to identify cultural gaps, and to set new norms to create a better, stronger culture.
Encourage managers to take notice of who often dominates the conversation in meetings or receives the most recognition for a project’s success. Make the evaluation criteria for projects as clear as possible: The more explicit the rubric, the less room for bias.

Include everyone

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Corporate Culture

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Teamwork

How to Manage a Hybrid Team

Some of the pre-pandemic rules still apply — but not all of them.

5 New Rules for Leading a Hybrid Team

Great leaders are committed to developing other people as leaders, encouraging them to step out of their comfort zone, and helping them learn from their setbacks and mistakes instead of punishing them for it.

Coach others into leadership roles

Great leaders are able to internalize the responsibilities, embody the culture of the company, and walk the talk.

Follow through on company values

This is often neglect in contemporary organizational life. People often join organzations because they enjoy the feeling of being in one and the role of the leader is to invest in the health, development, and growth of that community.
Leaders must also bear the unique responsibility of helping the community feel a sense of unity and collective identity.

Understand the symbolism of a leadership

Great leaders know the difference between leading and doing.
If a leader gets stuck in the process of 'doing' -- letting their ability rest on being the most effective person for that job instead of clustering more than qualified people for the technical skill -- then he is hindering the growth of the organization.

Know the difference between leading and doing

Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer and executive coach Ed Batista has worked with enough CEOs to recognize what makes some of them stand out. Turns out many of the best bosses share common strategies. Here are four things they do that take them from good enough to great.

The mission of Stanford Graduate School of Business is to create ideas that deepen and advance our understanding of management and with those ideas to develop innovative, principled, and insightful leaders who change the world.

This channel features thought leadership from world-class faculty and renowned guest speakers. You will also gain insight into what it's like to be a member of the Stanford GSB community, either as a student or an alumna/us. 

Contact us at gsb-social@lists.stanford.edu.

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Four Ways Good Leaders Become Great Ones

‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory.’

A good theory will inform your ideas and help get them across effectively. In fact, a good theory will probably allow you to do without all the fancy rhetoric and illustrations, and just focus on getting right to the point.

Theory informs action

A theory is more than just a hunch or an untested idea. It is a set of ideas that explains the way things work. It’s generally based on evidence, either real or imagined, that is gathered together into a logical pattern.

Explains the way things work

It has applications in all aspects of life. If you are a good cook, rather than just following someone else’s recipes you can come up with your own recipes. If you are a good mechanic, rather than just following the manufacturer’s directions for fixing your car, you can design your own way to do it.

It is not some academic concept.

<ul><li>It answers questions for which there are no answers now —</li><li>it explores how something might be — and it suggests avenues to explore, experiments to run, predictions to make.</li></ul>

A good theory does two things

A theory is a hint, a possibility, an intimation. It’s an idea that someone thinks is worth exploring or one that somebody already holds dear.

Theory as a hint

A good way to develop a theory is to start by looking for things we can agree on. For example, we can agree that good products and services solve problems. To be useful to our users, they must fulfil a real need, and fill their lives with more joy, satisfaction, and value than other solutions would.

How to develop a theory 

“These are the assumptions that shape any organization’s behaviour, dictate its decisions about what to do and what not to do, and define what the organization considers meaningful results. These assumptions are about markets. They are about identifying customers and competitors, their values and behaviour. They are about technology and its dynamics, about a company’s strengths and weaknesses. These assumptions are about what a company gets paid for. They are what I call a company’s theory of the business.”

On a day-to-day basis, you might not be aware of it but you are constantly using the skills of critical thinking. Whether you are shopping for food, deciding on your career, or deciding what to write…

Nothing so practical as a good theory

“If your goal is innovation, then your role must instead be to create an environment—a setting, a context, an organization—where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovation themselves: to collaborate, learn through trial and error, and make integrated decisions.”

Innovation is often a group effort, not an isolated individual who works alone. Better ideas arise when people with different views can express their ideas and receive feedback. Innovations are discovered after countless experimentation and trial and error. This can take time.

The collective genius

Good leaders encourage discovery and innovation.<ul><li>Leaders ensure their organisations are collaborative and make integrative decisions.</li><li>They help with conflict resolution without providing a solution to a group.</li><li>They encourage multiple opinions.</li></ul>

Leading innovation

Innovation needs paradoxical qualities: Freedom and restraint. Unleashing and harnessing resources like talent and ideas. Harmony in the team and conflict. <ul><li>A good leader encourages people to express their viewpoints. They create an open environment where people feel comfortable contributing their ideas, knowing others will listen to them but also challenge their ideas.</li><li>Good leaders encourage experimentation, iteration, learning and starting over.</li><li>However, learning should be balanced with performance; creative freedom with boundaries (schedules, budgets, rules and procedures).</li></ul>

Collective genius needs leadership

The traditional leadership model tends to squash creativity. The boss creates the ideas, then tells everyone what they should do. This model doesn't work when the goal is to create something new because even the leaders don't know the outcome.To cultivate innovative conditions, leaders should create an environment where people are encouraged to be creative:<ul><li>Increase transparency to build employee trust.</li><li>Make management more accessible and accountable so that employees can flag problems.</li><li>Empower employees so that they will take initiative.</li></ul>

The traditional model of leadership

People want to feel like they're part of a community and work on something bigger than themselves. A brand can be used to unite and motivate employees around a common purpose. Leaders create the space for innovation. They create an environment in which people want to work and can get the work done. For example, De Meo, head of sales and marketing at Volkswagen, established a lab where employees from different departments could work together. He provided little direction and almost complete autonomy. It improved collaboration skills and caused employees to create innovative solutions.

Building a creative community

Values define what is important to a group. They determine the group's priorities. Innovative groups share four core values: <ul><li>Bold ambition: A group with a bold purpose will take on big challenges. Bold groups want to improve the world, and they feel they can improve it.</li><li>Collaboration: Innovative companies intentionally build collaboration into their strategies. Innovation is the result of diverse people working together on a problem.</li><li>Learning: When you try something new, mistakes are inevitable. </li><li> The group shares a sense of responsibility and ownership for the outcomes.</li></ul>

The values of innovative groups

Good ideas are shaped by discussion, debate and conflict. For people to be creative and innovative, they need to be good at disagreeing while staying respectful and treating each other as equals.Creative abrasion is a skill that can be learned:<ul><li>A diverse group of people need to create a lot of ideas and must be willing for their ideas to be criticised.</li><li>Productive conflict requires trust between team members. Conflict that becomes personal shouldn't be tolerated.</li><li>Leaders should not impose solutions on the team but ask questions that help the team create their own solutions. </li></ul>

Creative friction

Creative agility is the groups' ability to continually find out what works. Learning and development are balanced with tangible results. ﻿Constant experimentation stimulates innovation. When the path forward is unclear, the agile team uses a cycle of trial and error, and reflection and analysis until a solution emerges. Each cycle uses the lessons learned from the previous cycle. A certain amount of failure is inevitable, so leaders should learn to accept that mistakes are an important part of learning and should be tolerated.

Creative agility

Ideas are created through discussion and conflict, and solutions are tested via trial and error. The next part is creative resolution. Here it is important to balance perseverance with endurance. At this point, the leader establishes the boundaries and conditions for the work. The leader is the social architect who makes innovation possible, but for the most part, innovation comes from team members.

Creative resolution

Some challenges are so big and complex that they require multiple disciplines to deal with them, often beyond a single organisation. Unlike innovative teams within a single company, teams across organisations often feel competitive or hostile to one another. Leaders may focus too much on the rules and boundaries, but fostering participants' willingness to engage is more important to building community. To build a community essential for innovation, first get everyone to agree on the goal of the effort, then set the conditions for working together.

Creating an innovation ecosystem

A guide to managing people and getting the most out of them

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Books

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Time Management

The Art of Leadership 

The author argues that the traditional autocratic leadership model does not work for innovative businesses. Instead, innovation requires a different type of leader that can foster a stimulating and supportive working environment.

Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.

Named one of "10 Management Classics for 2022" by Thinkers50Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.

Linda A. Hill

Greg Brandeau

Emily Truelove

Kent Lineback

Collective Genius

Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

Traditional decision making often follows these stages to get to a single choice or answer:
<ul>
<li>We consider a number of choices, discussing the pros and cons of each choice or option.</li>
<li>If available, we’ll present data for each option.</li>
<li>We vote for our favoured choice (dot voting is a nice technique to use here).</li>
<li>We end up with a single choice that we can or can’t all live with, and perhaps we made a compromise to get to the final decision.</li>
</ul>
The problem here is that we too often end up with a watered-down compromise that we can live with, but that doesn’t fully address our needs or address the problem.

Integrative Thinking and Making Decisions

The four critical steps as part of the process for Integrative Thinking:
<ul>
<li>Articulate the models – Understand the problem and opposing models more deeply.</li>
<li>Examine the models – Define the points of tension, assumptions, and cause-and-effect forces.</li>
<li> Explore the possibilities – Play with the pathways to integration.</li>
<li>Assess the prototypes – Test and refine the possibilities.</li>
</ul>

Creating Great Choices

<ul>
<li>First, you define the problem you face. For example, through a problem statement you can figure out what the problem is and whether it’s worth solving. </li>
<li>The next step is to sketch two opposing ideas, explaining at a high level what each model would look like in practice. </li>
<li>Once the opposing models are clear, you explore each model in turn, seeking to understand how the model works, what benefits it produces, and why these outcomes matter.</li>
</ul>

Articulate The Models

Here you actively encourage the tension that comes from looking at the two opposing models together, through a series of exploratory questions:
<ul>
<li>Ask yourself how the models are similar and different.</li>
<li>Consider what you most value from the models as they’re articulated.</li>
<li>Question the models as you have articulated them and the benefits you’ve defined.</li>
<li>Explore the assumptions that underlie each model.</li>
<li>What are the cause-and-effect relationships there at work in the models?</li>
</ul>

Examining The Models

The next step is to try and integrate them into a “new, superior answer”. 
There are three guiding questions that you can use to come up with a new, integrated solution:
<ul>
<li>How might we create a new model using one building block from each opposing model, while throwing away the rest of each model?</li>
<li>Under what conditions could a more intense version of one model actually generate one vital benefit of the other?</li>
<li>How might the problem be broken apart in a new way so that each model could be applied in whole to distinct parts of the problem?</li>
</ul>

Exploring The Possibilities

The final step in the integrative process is to test your prototype solutions in order to discard or improve them. This can be done by sharing your ideas with (target) customers.
At its core, Integrative Thinking sets out to resolve the tension of opposing models by creating new models that contain elements of the original models. As a result, we’re creating new, superior solutions and ways of thinking.

Assessing The Prototypes

Move Beyond Trade-Off Thinking When it comes to our hardest choices, it can seem as though making trade-offs is inevitable. But what about those crucial times when accepting the obvious trade-off just isn't good enough? What do we do when the choices in front of us don't get us what we need? In those cases, rather than choosing the least worst option, we can use the models in front of us to create a new and superior answer. This is integrative thinking. First introduced by world-renowned strategic thinker Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind, integrative thinking is an approach to problem solving that uses opposing ideas as the basis for innovation. Now, in Creating Great Choices, Martin and his longtime thinking partner Jennifer Riel vividly illustrate how integrative thinking works, and how to do it. The book includes fresh stories of successful integrative thinkers that will demystify the process of creative problem solving, as well as practical tools and exercises to help readers engage with the ideas. And it lays out the authors' four-step methodology for creating great choices, which can be applied in virtually any context. The result is a replicable, thoughtful approach to finding a "third and better way" to make important choices in the face of unacceptable trade‐offs. Insightful and instructive, Creating Great Choices blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

"The rarest of business books that teaches decision makers how to think, not what to think." - Malcolm Gladwell When it comes to our hardest choices, it can seem as though making trade-offs is inevitable. But what about those crucial times when accepting the obvious trade-off just isn't good enough? What do we do when the choices in front of us don't get us what we need? Rather than choosing the least worst option, Creating Great Choices offers a model that guides you towards a new and superior answer... integrative thinking. First introduced by world-renowned strategic thinker Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind, integrative thinking is an approach to problem solving that uses opposing ideas as the basis for innovation. Now, in Creating Great Choices, Martin and his longtime thinking partner Jennifer Riel vividly illustrate how integrative thinking works, and how to do it.The book includes fresh stories of successful integrative thinkers that will demystify the process of creative problem solving, as well as practical tools and exercises to help readers engage with the ideas. And it lays out the authors' four-step methodology for creating great choices, which can be applied in virtually any context. The result is a replicable, thoughtful approach to finding a "third and better way" to make important choices in the face of unacceptable trade‐offs.Insightful and instructive, Creating Great Choices blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

Jennifer Riel

Roger L. Martin

Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, has a model that can help companies not only to deal with critical moments in their existence but also use them to thrive.Intel’s CEO, Andy Grove, calls these moments “strategic inflection points” or SIPs. He presents advice for surviving and thriving in these critical times.Key points:• It’s not always a good idea to keep secrets.• Open communication with outsiders is important.• A company shouldn’t trust the opinion of someone who feels emotionally attached to it.

Only The Paranoid Survive

A strategic inflection point(SIP) is when the balance of forces shifts from the old structure, from the old ways of doing business, from the old ways of competing, to the new.” In other words, a strategic inflection point brings on a significant change of fundamentals, which it’s hard to fully plan for, formally at least. This doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t plan, but that we should look at ways in which we, our teams and our businesses can best respond to change.

Strategic Inflection Points

The late author warns against the ‘inertia of success’ and encourages readers to expose themselves to the winds of change and to do so constantly. His point is that strategic inflection isn’t a point; it’s a long, torturous struggle in which we’ll have to manage the chaos. To do this, the leader has to:<ul><li>Let it reign – “Resolution comes through experimentation. Only stepping out of the old ruts will bring new insights.” </li><li>Rein it in – Clarity of direction, which includes describing what we’re going after, is exceedingly important at the late stage of the strategic transformation</li></ul>

Success Inertia

IBM was greatly affected by how their computers were built because they used to sell pre-built computers but then people could combine components like microchips, hard drive software etc., so now consumers preferred designing their own PCs instead of buying pre-made ones from IBMAlthough IBM tried to develop PCs for the masses, they were too late and failed. The market had already gone to other companies who sold computers with better technology.

The IBM Example

SIPs are not just relevant to CEOs. Rather, they affect all employees at every level of a company. That’s why everyone should be prepared for such situations because jobs can be lost when SIPs occur. In extreme cases, a SIP could even result in the entire business shutting down and thus causing every employee to lose their job. For example, when sound was first introduced into movies, actors were forced to choose whether they wanted to stick with silent films or adapt to the new. Some adapted and became successful movie stars; others failed because they didn’t adapt well enough.

How CEOs and Employees Need to Respond To Strategic Inflection Points

The Late Andy Grove talks about managing change in this classic leadership book.

Andy Grove, founder and former CEO of Intel shares his strategy for success as he takes the reader deep inside the workings of a major company in Only the Paranoid Survive. Under Andy Grove's leadership, Intel became the world's largest chip maker and one of the most admired companies in the world. In Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove reveals his strategy for measuring the nightmare moment every leader dreads--when massive change occurs and a company must, virtually overnight, adapt or fall by the wayside--in a new way. Grove calls such a moment a Strategic Inflection Point, which can be set off by almost anything: mega-competition, a change in regulations, or a seemingly modest change in technology. When a Strategic Inflection Point hits, the ordinary rules of business go out the window. Yet, managed right, a Strategic Inflection Point can be an opportunity to win in the marketplace and emerge stronger than ever. Grove underscores his message by examining his own record of success and failure, including how he navigated the events of the Pentium flaw, which threatened Intel's reputation in 1994, and how he has dealt with the explosions in growth of the Internet. The work of a lifetime, Only the Paranoid Survive is a classic of managerial and leadership skills.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

Andy Grove, founder and former CEO of Intel shares his strategy for success as he takes the reader deep inside the workings of a major company in Only the Paranoid Survive. Under Andy Grove's leadership, Intel became the world's largest chip maker and one of the most admired companies in the world. In Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove reveals his strategy for measuring the nightmare moment every leader dreads--when massive change occurs and a company must, virtually overnight, adapt or fall by the wayside--in a new way. Grove calls such a moment a Strategic Inflection Point, which can be set off by almost anything: mega-competition, a change in regulations, or a seemingly modest change in technology. When a Strategic Inflection Point hits, the ordinary rules of business go out the window. Yet, managed right, a Strategic Inflection Point can be an opportunity to win in the marketplace and emerge stronger than ever. Grove underscores his message by examining his own record of success and failure, including how he navigated the events of the Pentium flaw, which threatened Intel's reputation in 1994, and how he has dealt with the explosions in growth of the Internet. The work of a lifetime, Only the Paranoid Survive is a classic of managerial and leadership skills.

Andrew S. Grove

Only the Paranoid Survive

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