In fact, research on creativity shows that significant creative contributors have wide interests, a breadth of perspective, and a need for novelty and diversity. Innovation often comes from seeing the relationship between unconnected ideas and melding them together.

There is no such thing as an unintuitive person; everyone has intuition. The difficulty comes in recognizing and using it. What does it take to effectively use your intuition? Here are a few suggestions. Go right to the heart of any problem or decision. Don’t let a myriad of data, analysis, options, and probabilities overwhelm you and push you into

“No one is ever told to shut up, but you are asked to come up with better arguments. People are allowed to be persistent.”50 The phrase, “People are allowed to be persistent,” is perfect. It captures the notion of a “Darwinian” or free-market style environment where ideas are never killed outright, but where the fittest ideas survive.

Does this mean that you should only have one thing on your “to do” list? Yes and no. Clearly, it is virtually impossible to lead a company and have only one “to do” on your list. But you should be spending the bulk of your time on your number one priority, concentrating your efforts on that priority until it is complete.

When Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, introduced me at a gathering for KIPP Schools in 2014, he surprised me by saying that when he was a young entrepreneur, he’d read Beyond Entrepreneurship six times.

“History is the study of surprises.” This line from history professor Edward T. O’Donnell captures the world in which we live.6 We’re living history, surprise after surprise after surprise. And just when we think we’ve had all the big surprises for a while, along comes another one. If the first two decades of the twenty-first century have taught us

We will address this question throughout this chapter. But the first step is to recognize that you need both idea-push and market-pull in your company. The classic business school market-pull dogma shouldn’t be mindlessly worshipped. Yet, at the same time, there certainly is a place for market input, as ignoring customer input can lead to missed op

Most important, each strategic priority must be broken down into “bite-sized,” discrete chunks—milestones. Think back to the analogy of climbing the sheer face of El Capitan. You don’t think about all 3,500 feet of rock at once; you break the climb into manageable 100 foot sections (called pitches). It is the concentration on one pitch at a time th

This notion of leading a market—of creating a market—is essential to breakthrough innovations. With dramatic, new innovations, customers will often not tell you what they want (because they do not know what is possible) until you show them what they can have—as was the case with the 3M Post-it Notes, the radio, and the fax machine.