Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries

organizational management has been developing methods for increasing productivity and minimizing risk and errors that tend to stifle creative experimentation.

do things to discover what they should do.

Chance opportunities are a numbers game. The more people and perspectives in your sphere of reference, the more likely good insights and opportunities will combine, as they often did for Tim Russert.

“But by the time they are six and a half years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.”

To launch these big new businesses, the company’s managers took rigorously logical steps. They worked on numerous initiatives in large, growing markets that were adjacent to or somewhat related to HP’s existing business. However, they only looked at opportunities that were already billion dollar markets. Barnholt recalls, “Around that time, people

Wiseman believed another type of behavior played an even greater role in success. Wiseman found that lucky people build and maintain what he called a strong network of luck. He wrote: Lucky people are effective at building secure, and long-lasting, attachments with the people they meet. They are easy to know and most people like them. They tend to

He discovered his unique style later in life, thanks in part to a handful of artists he got to know during the 1950s and 1960s. “The biggest influence on the design of my houses was Robert Rauschenberg,” Gehry says in Sketches with Frank Gehry. As a pioneer of abstract art known as Neo-Dadaist, Rauschenberg would use everyday objects that he’d find

Interestingly, with each success they’ve had, they have challenged themselves even more, and in keeping with that, they have used more storyboards: 27,565 on A Bug’s Life, 43,536 for Finding Nemo, 69,562 for Ratatouille, and 98,173 for WALL-E. That’s a striking expression of healthy perfectionism. The primary venue for monitoring progress with thes

As Barnholt recalls, “It was very much a deductive, analytical process to identify a grand set of opportunities.” Possibilities included areas like flat screen displays, uninterruptable power supplies, or smart utility monitoring of homes. “We had all these ideas. And they were all big,” Barnholt recalls, “but they all failed!” Able to grin about i

lucky people pay more attention to what’s going on around them than unlucky people.