Sublime

When we bemoan the lack of originality in the world, we blame it on the absence of creativity. If only people could generate more novel ideas, we'd all be better off. But in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation-it's idea selection. In one analysis, when over two hundred people dreamed up more than a thousand ideas for

One recent IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs reports that creativity is the single most important leadership competency for enterprises facing the complexity of global commerce today.

most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas—they discover them.

In each case, a brilliant man put his company in jeopardy because measuring himself and his legacy outweighed everything else.

The other 50% (which almost never gets talked about) is how to come up with ideas that scale.

As Alph Bingham noticed, for difficult challenges organizations tend toward local search. They rely on specialists in a single knowledge domain, and methods that have worked before. (Think about the lab with only E. coli specialists from chapter 5.) If those fail, they’re stuck. For the most intractable problems, “our research shows that a

Warren Bennis Santa Monica, California November 1996