To reiterate, it is the focus on people—their work habits, their talents, their values—that is absolutely central to any creative venture.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

“edifice complex,” wherein companies build shiny headquarters that are mere extensions of executive ego.

Let us return, for a moment, to the metaphor I used earlier in this chapter, that of the door. On one side is everything we see and know—the world as we understand it. On the other side is everything we can’t see and don’t know—unsolved problems, unexpressed emotions, unrealized possibilities so innumerable that imagining them is inconceivable.

While planning is very important, and we do a lot of it, there is only so much you can control in a creative environment. In general, I have found that people who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly. The overplanners just take

The better approach, I believe, is to accept that we can’t understand every facet of a complex environment and to focus, instead, on techniques to deal with combining different viewpoints. If we start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, we become more effective because our ideas or decisions are honed

“Here are the qualifications required: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.”

I remember going home at night, exhausted, feeling like I was balancing on the backs of a herd of horses—only some of the horses were thoroughbreds, some were completely wild, and some were ponies who were struggling to keep up. I found it hard enough to hold on, let alone steer.

When managers explain what their plan is without giving the reasons for it, people wonder what the “real” agenda is. There may be no hidden agenda, but you’ve succeeded in implying that there is one. Discussing the thought processes behind solutions aims the focus on the solutions, not on second-guessing. When we are honest, people know it.