Scan barcode
fbroom's review
2.0
1 star for the stories and the structure and 5 stars for the ideas!! although for people who always read business book regularly I understand that even the ideas might not be new.
He lost all credibility to me when he praised some "geniuses" that you looked up later and discovered the opportunities they were born that puts them ahead of everyone in the first place.
So many ways to look at this book:
Structure & Stories: 1/5
Ideas: 5/5
- Structure: I didn’t necessarily liked the structure, jumping between stories actually confused me a lot and I had to re-read some parts. Also each chapter presented many ideas and some of these ideas can get lost between stories.
- Stories/Content: I also didn’t the stories are interesting and some seemed way over hyped like the Meredith Perry story. I was also bored many times.
- Ideas: Yet there were many great ideas in this book. Yes you can’t really prove that these ideas work and mentioning a couple of stories doesn’t turn these ideas into facts! but at least they will make you think about things. Unfortunately these ideas are really buried in some not so interesting and long stories!!
- Advice: The summary chapter at the end of the book is great. It would’ve been much better if I read each chapter summary from the last chapter after each individual chapter!
Highlights:
- "The fall from low to lower hardly hurts; the fall from middle to low is devastating."
- You can’t judge your own work and neither can our managers, the best to judge is your peers.
- Intuition only works if you have a lot of experience.
- Great work comes from generating a lot of work.
- Procrastination can be a good thing.
- Being the first isn’t necessarily the best move.
- Start with a novel idea but find a familiar link for others to understand it.
- Negative thinking, imaging the worst possible scenarios prepares you better.
- Praise the character not the behavior (Don’t be a cheater vs don’t cheat)
- Use role models for your children.
Chapter 1: Creative Destruction
Ideas:
- Don’t accept the defaults.
- You don’t have to take extreme risks to pursue opportunities.
- Don’t focus on achievements. (focusing on achievements leads to dreading failure)
Example 1: Study showing employees using chrome and Firefox were better because they didn’t accept the default browsers.
Example 2: Warby Parker. The author didn’t invest in them because they didn’t match the entrepreneur stereotype (leave their jobs, decisive, risk takers … etc). Turns out successful entrepreneurs most likely have stayed in their jobs for a while before moving to focus full time on their new ideas.
[I kind of disagree here. I mean it does sound good, but If I had followed this model and stayed back home to keep my job, I would’ve not reached where I’m right now. I think sometimes you just have to risk it PLUS sometimes having security and comfort pushes you backward instead of forward.]
Example 3: Prodigy children who end up not achieving much other than scoring high on tests because they are taught to focus on achievement. "They are hindered by achievement motivation and the more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure."
Chapter 2: Blind Investors and One Eyed Investors
"This chapter is about the hurdles and best practices in idea selection"
Many points:
- You can’t judge your own work.
- The best to judge your work are your peers. “They have no particular investment in our ideas, which gives them enough distance to offer an honest appraisal and protects against false positives.”
- Managers on the other hand are not great at judging new ideas. Lots at stake for managers.
- Having too much depth clouds your judgement. Example was traditional NBC executives rejecting Seinfeld.
- Intuition is only valid when you have a lot of experience in your field. Example was Steve Jobs judging the Segway to be great.
- To excel in your field the best thing to do is to work a lot more. "Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality.
- Getting involved in the arts makes more creative. "the Nobel Prize winners were dramatically more likely to be involved in the arts than less accomplished scientists.”
Chapter 3: Out on a Limb
[Need to re-read]
"You’ve spent hours, days, weeks, months, or maybe even years thinking about the idea. You’ve contemplated the problem, formulated the solution, and rehearsed the vision. You know the lyrics and the melody of your idea by heart. By that point, it’s no longer possible to imagine what it sounds like to an audience that’s listening to it for the first time."
"The fall from low to lower hardly hurts; the fall from middle to low is devastating."
"In the quest for originality, neglect isn’t an option. Persistence is a temporary route to earning the right to speak up. But in the long run, like neglect, persistence maintains the status quo and falls short of resolving your dissatisfaction. To change the situation, exit and voice are the only viable alternatives."
"It was the impossibility of exit that led Carmen Medina to move national security forward; it was the possibility of exit that enabled Donna Dubinsky to pioneer the smartphone revolution. The lesson here is that voice isn’t inherently superior to exit. In some circumstances, leaving a stifling organization can be a better path to originality."
Chapter 4: Fools Rush In
- Those who procrastinate end up with more creative ideas. Procrastination helps creativity.
- “When you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea. As a result, you consider a wider range of original concepts and ultimately choose a more novel direction."
- However "if the employees weren’t intrinsically motivated to solve a major problem, stalling just set them behind. But when they were passionate about coming up with new ideas, putting off the task led them to more creative solutions.
- Being the first isn’t necessarily the best. “The downsides of being the first mover are frequently bigger than the upsides.”
- "The time at which we reach our heights of originality, and how long they last, depends on our styles of thinking".
- There are two different styles: conceptual and experimental. "Conceptual innovators formulate a big idea and set out to execute it. Experimental innovators solve problems through trial and error, learning and evolving as they go along".
- On average the conceptual innovators did their most influential work at forty-three, whereas the experimental innovators did theirs at sixty-one. (Nobel Prize winners).
- Conceptual innovation can be done quickly, because it doesn’t require years of methodical investigation.
- Conceptual breakthroughs tend to occur early, because it is easiest to come up with a strikingly original insight when we approach a problem with a fresh perspective. "Conceptual innovators normally make their most important contributions to a discipline not long after their first exposure to it"
Chapter 5: Goldilocks and the Trojan Horse
"The key insight is a Goldilocks theory of coalition formation. The originals who start a movement will often be its most radical members, whose ideas and ideals will prove too hot for those who follow their lead."
Ideas:
- "The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity, which capitalizes on the mere exposure effect we covered earlier.”
- "The more strongly you identify with an extreme group, the harder you seek to differentiate yourself from more moderate groups that threaten your values.” Example vegans dislike vegetarians more than the rest of the population.
- “Shared tactics were an important predictor of alliances. Even if they care about different causes, groups find affinity when they use the same methods of engagement.”
- Relationships that are both positive and negative should be avoided. You can turn rivals (negative) into positive and you can count on the positive ones but the positive/negative (ambivalent relationships) are best avoided
The first idea was illustrated with how Disney’s Lion King started with a radical idea about a lions in Africa different than the usual Disney movies. The idea didn’t go well at first but when the writers presented the idea with the obvious link to Hamlet it immediately clicked and executives were able to see it.
These four ideas were also explored through out the story of the suffragist movement and the split between Stone and Anthony/Stanton.
"It’s highly unlikely that Frances Willard would have started the women’s suffrage movement. Justin Berg’s research suggests that if women had begun with the familiar goal of protecting their homes, they might never have considered the vote. Radical thinking is often necessary to put an original stake in the ground. But once the radical idea of voting was planted, the original suffragists needed a more tempered mediator to reach a wider audience."
“Originality is what everybody wants, but there’s a sweet spot,” Rob Minkoff explains. “If it’s not original enough, it’s boring or trite. If it’s too original, it may be hard for the audience to understand. The goal is to push the envelope, not tear the envelope.”
Chapter 6: Rebel with a Cause
Example story: Jackie Robinson
The hypothesis is that later-born children rebel more. “Laterborns have typically been half a century ahead of firstborns in their willingness to endorse radical innovations.”
Causes could be parenting style differences with the first child than the younger siblings (more freedom, easier … etc). "By adopting the parenting practices that are typically applied primarily to younger children, we can raise any child to become more original."
Parenting Ideas:
- Always explain your actions to your children.
- Praise the character not the behavior. "Children who received character praise were subsequently more generous"
- Use nouns not verbs. (nouns have more effect)
- “Children between ages three and six were 22 percent to 29 percent more likely to clean up blocks, toys, and crayons when they were asked to be helpers instead of to help."
- "instead of “Please don’t cheat,” they changed the appeal to “Please don’t be a cheater.”
- “Don’t Drink and Drive” could be rephrased as: “Don’t Be a Drunk Driver.”
- Use role models. "If we want to encourage originality, the best step we can take is to raise our children’s aspirations by introducing them to different kinds of role models."
Chapter 7: Rethinking Groupthink
This chapter is about preventing groupthink
Example story: Polaroid vs Bridgewater
When companies hire there are three primary templates: professional (looking for people with skill and experience), star (looking for talent that can grow) and commitment (cultural fit). Companies which hire based on commitment have the best initial grow.
Long term results differ however and the stories of both Polaroid and Bridgewater are discussed. Over time Polaroid grew into a coherent tight knit community where they all think very similarly and if someone disagreed they would be humiliated and this has lead to groupthink and eventually costing Polaroid a lot of money. On the other hand, Bridgewater set a lot of events that helped prevent groupthink such as:
- Openly criticizing their CEO if he made a mistake.
- Lots of open discussions to resolve conflicts.
- “Kill the company” events where employees think of ways to beat their own company and then use these ideas later to improve their company.
- Encourage employees to bring up issues and problems.
and so on.
Chapter 8: Rocking the Boat and Keeping it Steady
- Negative Thinking
"They deliberately imagine a disaster scenario to intensify their anxiety and convert it into motivation."
"Once they’ve considered the worst, they’re driven to avoid it, considering every relevant detail to make sure they don’t crash and burn, which enables them to feel a sense of control."
"When students labeled their emotions as excitement, their speeches were rated as 17 percent more persuasive and 15 percent more confident than those of students who branded themselves calm."
- Focus on the victim, not the abuser
"One of the fundamental problems with venting is that it focuses attention on the perpetrator of injustice. The more you think about the person who wronged you, the more violently you want to lash out in retaliation. To channel anger productively, instead of venting about the harm that a perpetrator has done, we need to reflect on the victims who have suffered from it."
He lost all credibility to me when he praised some "geniuses" that you looked up later and discovered the opportunities they were born that puts them ahead of everyone in the first place.
So many ways to look at this book:
Structure & Stories: 1/5
Ideas: 5/5
- Structure: I didn’t necessarily liked the structure, jumping between stories actually confused me a lot and I had to re-read some parts. Also each chapter presented many ideas and some of these ideas can get lost between stories.
- Stories/Content: I also didn’t the stories are interesting and some seemed way over hyped like the Meredith Perry story. I was also bored many times.
- Ideas: Yet there were many great ideas in this book. Yes you can’t really prove that these ideas work and mentioning a couple of stories doesn’t turn these ideas into facts! but at least they will make you think about things. Unfortunately these ideas are really buried in some not so interesting and long stories!!
- Advice: The summary chapter at the end of the book is great. It would’ve been much better if I read each chapter summary from the last chapter after each individual chapter!
Highlights:
- "The fall from low to lower hardly hurts; the fall from middle to low is devastating."
- You can’t judge your own work and neither can our managers, the best to judge is your peers.
- Intuition only works if you have a lot of experience.
- Great work comes from generating a lot of work.
- Procrastination can be a good thing.
- Being the first isn’t necessarily the best move.
- Start with a novel idea but find a familiar link for others to understand it.
- Negative thinking, imaging the worst possible scenarios prepares you better.
- Praise the character not the behavior (Don’t be a cheater vs don’t cheat)
- Use role models for your children.
Chapter 1: Creative Destruction
Ideas:
- Don’t accept the defaults.
- You don’t have to take extreme risks to pursue opportunities.
- Don’t focus on achievements. (focusing on achievements leads to dreading failure)
Example 1: Study showing employees using chrome and Firefox were better because they didn’t accept the default browsers.
Example 2: Warby Parker. The author didn’t invest in them because they didn’t match the entrepreneur stereotype (leave their jobs, decisive, risk takers … etc). Turns out successful entrepreneurs most likely have stayed in their jobs for a while before moving to focus full time on their new ideas.
[I kind of disagree here. I mean it does sound good, but If I had followed this model and stayed back home to keep my job, I would’ve not reached where I’m right now. I think sometimes you just have to risk it PLUS sometimes having security and comfort pushes you backward instead of forward.]
Example 3: Prodigy children who end up not achieving much other than scoring high on tests because they are taught to focus on achievement. "They are hindered by achievement motivation and the more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure."
Chapter 2: Blind Investors and One Eyed Investors
"This chapter is about the hurdles and best practices in idea selection"
Many points:
- You can’t judge your own work.
- The best to judge your work are your peers. “They have no particular investment in our ideas, which gives them enough distance to offer an honest appraisal and protects against false positives.”
- Managers on the other hand are not great at judging new ideas. Lots at stake for managers.
- Having too much depth clouds your judgement. Example was traditional NBC executives rejecting Seinfeld.
- Intuition is only valid when you have a lot of experience in your field. Example was Steve Jobs judging the Segway to be great.
- To excel in your field the best thing to do is to work a lot more. "Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality.
- Getting involved in the arts makes more creative. "the Nobel Prize winners were dramatically more likely to be involved in the arts than less accomplished scientists.”
Chapter 3: Out on a Limb
[Need to re-read]
"You’ve spent hours, days, weeks, months, or maybe even years thinking about the idea. You’ve contemplated the problem, formulated the solution, and rehearsed the vision. You know the lyrics and the melody of your idea by heart. By that point, it’s no longer possible to imagine what it sounds like to an audience that’s listening to it for the first time."
"The fall from low to lower hardly hurts; the fall from middle to low is devastating."
"In the quest for originality, neglect isn’t an option. Persistence is a temporary route to earning the right to speak up. But in the long run, like neglect, persistence maintains the status quo and falls short of resolving your dissatisfaction. To change the situation, exit and voice are the only viable alternatives."
"It was the impossibility of exit that led Carmen Medina to move national security forward; it was the possibility of exit that enabled Donna Dubinsky to pioneer the smartphone revolution. The lesson here is that voice isn’t inherently superior to exit. In some circumstances, leaving a stifling organization can be a better path to originality."
Chapter 4: Fools Rush In
- Those who procrastinate end up with more creative ideas. Procrastination helps creativity.
- “When you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea. As a result, you consider a wider range of original concepts and ultimately choose a more novel direction."
- However "if the employees weren’t intrinsically motivated to solve a major problem, stalling just set them behind. But when they were passionate about coming up with new ideas, putting off the task led them to more creative solutions.
- Being the first isn’t necessarily the best. “The downsides of being the first mover are frequently bigger than the upsides.”
- "The time at which we reach our heights of originality, and how long they last, depends on our styles of thinking".
- There are two different styles: conceptual and experimental. "Conceptual innovators formulate a big idea and set out to execute it. Experimental innovators solve problems through trial and error, learning and evolving as they go along".
- On average the conceptual innovators did their most influential work at forty-three, whereas the experimental innovators did theirs at sixty-one. (Nobel Prize winners).
- Conceptual innovation can be done quickly, because it doesn’t require years of methodical investigation.
- Conceptual breakthroughs tend to occur early, because it is easiest to come up with a strikingly original insight when we approach a problem with a fresh perspective. "Conceptual innovators normally make their most important contributions to a discipline not long after their first exposure to it"
Chapter 5: Goldilocks and the Trojan Horse
"The key insight is a Goldilocks theory of coalition formation. The originals who start a movement will often be its most radical members, whose ideas and ideals will prove too hot for those who follow their lead."
Ideas:
- "The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity, which capitalizes on the mere exposure effect we covered earlier.”
- "The more strongly you identify with an extreme group, the harder you seek to differentiate yourself from more moderate groups that threaten your values.” Example vegans dislike vegetarians more than the rest of the population.
- “Shared tactics were an important predictor of alliances. Even if they care about different causes, groups find affinity when they use the same methods of engagement.”
- Relationships that are both positive and negative should be avoided. You can turn rivals (negative) into positive and you can count on the positive ones but the positive/negative (ambivalent relationships) are best avoided
The first idea was illustrated with how Disney’s Lion King started with a radical idea about a lions in Africa different than the usual Disney movies. The idea didn’t go well at first but when the writers presented the idea with the obvious link to Hamlet it immediately clicked and executives were able to see it.
These four ideas were also explored through out the story of the suffragist movement and the split between Stone and Anthony/Stanton.
"It’s highly unlikely that Frances Willard would have started the women’s suffrage movement. Justin Berg’s research suggests that if women had begun with the familiar goal of protecting their homes, they might never have considered the vote. Radical thinking is often necessary to put an original stake in the ground. But once the radical idea of voting was planted, the original suffragists needed a more tempered mediator to reach a wider audience."
“Originality is what everybody wants, but there’s a sweet spot,” Rob Minkoff explains. “If it’s not original enough, it’s boring or trite. If it’s too original, it may be hard for the audience to understand. The goal is to push the envelope, not tear the envelope.”
Chapter 6: Rebel with a Cause
Example story: Jackie Robinson
The hypothesis is that later-born children rebel more. “Laterborns have typically been half a century ahead of firstborns in their willingness to endorse radical innovations.”
Causes could be parenting style differences with the first child than the younger siblings (more freedom, easier … etc). "By adopting the parenting practices that are typically applied primarily to younger children, we can raise any child to become more original."
Parenting Ideas:
- Always explain your actions to your children.
- Praise the character not the behavior. "Children who received character praise were subsequently more generous"
- Use nouns not verbs. (nouns have more effect)
- “Children between ages three and six were 22 percent to 29 percent more likely to clean up blocks, toys, and crayons when they were asked to be helpers instead of to help."
- "instead of “Please don’t cheat,” they changed the appeal to “Please don’t be a cheater.”
- “Don’t Drink and Drive” could be rephrased as: “Don’t Be a Drunk Driver.”
- Use role models. "If we want to encourage originality, the best step we can take is to raise our children’s aspirations by introducing them to different kinds of role models."
Chapter 7: Rethinking Groupthink
This chapter is about preventing groupthink
Example story: Polaroid vs Bridgewater
When companies hire there are three primary templates: professional (looking for people with skill and experience), star (looking for talent that can grow) and commitment (cultural fit). Companies which hire based on commitment have the best initial grow.
Long term results differ however and the stories of both Polaroid and Bridgewater are discussed. Over time Polaroid grew into a coherent tight knit community where they all think very similarly and if someone disagreed they would be humiliated and this has lead to groupthink and eventually costing Polaroid a lot of money. On the other hand, Bridgewater set a lot of events that helped prevent groupthink such as:
- Openly criticizing their CEO if he made a mistake.
- Lots of open discussions to resolve conflicts.
- “Kill the company” events where employees think of ways to beat their own company and then use these ideas later to improve their company.
- Encourage employees to bring up issues and problems.
and so on.
Chapter 8: Rocking the Boat and Keeping it Steady
- Negative Thinking
"They deliberately imagine a disaster scenario to intensify their anxiety and convert it into motivation."
"Once they’ve considered the worst, they’re driven to avoid it, considering every relevant detail to make sure they don’t crash and burn, which enables them to feel a sense of control."
"When students labeled their emotions as excitement, their speeches were rated as 17 percent more persuasive and 15 percent more confident than those of students who branded themselves calm."
- Focus on the victim, not the abuser
"One of the fundamental problems with venting is that it focuses attention on the perpetrator of injustice. The more you think about the person who wronged you, the more violently you want to lash out in retaliation. To channel anger productively, instead of venting about the harm that a perpetrator has done, we need to reflect on the victims who have suffered from it."
sdcox's review
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.75
I read this in about 3 days...no plane ride required. Burned valuable weekend time and YES I would do it again. Gave me a kick of much needed validation and motivation to continue to be a voice of change. I recommended to a colleague...who also devoured it in 3 days. AND now the two of us, vigilantes that we are, are encouraging nonconforming behaviors Department wide. 4.75/5 because I feel like if I tell you it's 5...you will think I'm conforming too much. Enjoy!
marisa_dc's review
3.0
Empieza muy bien, dando muy buenos tips para ser más creativo, ver las cosas desde otro punto de vista... A partir de la mitad del libro repite una y otra vez los mismos ejemplos y se vuelve un poco tedioso.
alyssaindira's review against another edition
2.0
Had to read this for class. And by "read" I mean scarcely skim over the pages then answer the prompts. XD. But I did kind of like some of the research studies and historical examples within the book.