“The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.”

If we want to understand how to manage fear, we don’t have to threaten people’s lives; we need only threaten to put them on stage.

For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck’s top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they had missed. Then, their challenge was to reverse their roles and figure out how to defend against these threats.*

Originality is not a fixed trait. It is a free choice. Lincoln wasn’t born with an original personality. Taking on controversy wasn’t programmed into his DNA; it was an act of conscious will. As the great thinker W. E. B. DuBois wrote, “He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.”

Albert Hirschman, there are four different options for handling a dissatisfying situation.

Managers tend to be too risk averse: they focus on the costs of investing in bad ideas rather than the benefits of piloting good ones, which leads them to commit a large number of false negatives.

The best way to get better at judging our ideas is to gather feedback.

The practice dates back to 1587, when Pope Sixtus V instituted a new process for vetting candidates for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. He assigned a promotor fidei, or promoter of the faith, to oppose canonization by critically evaluating the character of candidates and challenging claims of miracles they had performed. The promoter of the

The Positive Power of Negative Thinking Although many originals come across as beacons of conviction and confidence on the outside, their inner experiences are peppered with ambivalence and self-doubt.