Strategy

“Some projects benefit from early action. If you’re writing a book, it’s easy to spend a lot of time brainstorming titles and dreaming up an outline, but it’s better to simply write. The book discovers itself as you go. Yes, you’ll need to go back and organize things, but this is easier to do once you have material. The key is to act first and then... See more

What happens on the outside is strategy, what happens on the inside is action.

Anjali Sud: The way I think about a strategy is, “Is there a problem to be solved? Is it a mission-critical problem? And can you solve it better than anybody else?”

The best way to improve your ability to think is to spend time thinking.

One way to force yourself to slow down and think is to write. Good writing requires good thinking.

Clear writing gives poor thinking nowhere to hide, making a lack of understanding visible.

“A way to think about it is, innovation requires variation. And in manufacturing—six sigma, all that stuff—you’re trying to reduce variation.

The fundamental manufacturing paradigm is to reduce variation, and the fundamental creative paradigm is to increase it.”

“The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario, but a mindset that can handle uncertainty.”

whenever something isn’t working, I put my best A players on it immediately because I want to decide as fast as possible whether it’s an execution problem or an idea problem.