Best 83 quotes of Scott D. Anthony on MyQuotes

All disruptive innovators make it easier and more affordable for people to do what matters to them, and follow a strategy that doesn't at first glance make sense to the market leader.

Almost every disruption starts at the perceived fringes of today's market.

A next-generation innovation writer and thought leader worth watching.

Another key role the CEO plays is to focus efforts.

Any leader has two jobs to do. To do what they are currently doing better and more efficiently (call this strengthening the core), and to do what they are not currently doing but will need to do in the future (call this creating the new).

Anything that has low certainty or has a lot of impact should be tested early.

Anytime you see a constrained market, where consumption is limited to those who have special skills or are wealthy, that signals an opportunity for innovation.

Aside from the equivalent of blowing up the lab or letting a pathogen escape, the only failure is spending too long or too much money to learn.

A spreadsheet for an innovative idea reports the mathematical relationship between made up numbers. You can't cash a spreadsheet.

Avoiding along some dimensions is easy. Create organization space and bring in some new talent so the innate cultural resistance is less material. Unfortunately, it's rarely that easy.

Bring different groups together internally, send them out to visit other companies, or bring in interesting speeches. Show that you love learning by having people on staff whose job it is to explore without any near-term metrics. Publicly shut a project down and talk about what a great job a team did because they learned so much. And so on.

Companies get into grooves and they keep sharpening what they are doing, when in fact what they really need to do sometimes is to stop and do something completely differently.

Data about an innovative idea is rarely crystal clear.

Document, evaluate, focus, test.

Every great idea emerges out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation.

Every leader needs to watch what teenagers or startup companies - or startup companies headed by teenagers - are doing today, because many of those behaviors will be mainstream behaviors tomorrow.

Everyone knows innovation involves developing unique understanding of a market, thinking expansively to develop a solution, and then finding a way to test rigorously and adapt quickly.

First you document your idea. You should be comprehensive, but that doesn't mean you have to produce a doctoral thesis length plan. Rather you want to make sure you have touched all the different things that have to happen to succeed. Then, you evaluate your approach. The goal here isn't to figure out if your idea is good or bad, but rather to begin to figure out what are some of its weakest elements.

Good innovators are careful observers, network extensively, run experiments, ask lots of questions, and find ways to bring diverse ideas together. Overarching all of this is an intrinsic interest in working through puzzles.

Have a core concept, but wrap it in a full business model.

History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that's penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational.

I find social media as fun and engaging as the next person, but imagine if all the creative talent that was pouring into finding increasingly clever ways for us to broadcast daily banality (and then serve ads based on what is learned) instead focused on some of the UN Millennium goals? The world would be a better place.

If you are a large company and you want to do something unique, you almost by definition have to tap onto the core business in some way. Otherwise you are going into a naked fight against startups, and that's just a tough place to be.

If you are trying to improve the performance of existing operations in known markets, it is an analytical problem where it's just a question of aligning your execution engine in the right way. If it is about creating something new and different, you can't derive the right answer analytically.

If you work on a new product launch, spent time in a new geography, or work to develop a completely new skill, you have no choice but to figure out new ways to solve problems.

I have a fear right now that what I call the advertising-narcissism complex is sucking up way too much top talent.

I'm not very good at sitting still.

I'm suggesting that principles meant to deal with uncertainty that occurs naturally can be useful to manage the uncertainty that characterizes any new idea.

In my mind, so-called "cultures of innovation" really boil down to one word: curiosity.

Innovation is doubly hard inside big companies.

In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer. The decision-making systems here are meant to deal with the reality that decisions about innovative ideas will rely on patterns and intuitions. The best venture capital organizations deal with this challenge by staging investment, actively participating in startups they fund, tying decisions to learning as opposed to artificial dates on the calendar, and assembling a diverse team of decision-makers.

In the strengthening the core job, a leader can draw on their past experiences. After all, in most cases they did the job of the people that are reporting to them! So they know when something is screwed up, they know the risks worth taking, and they know the corners to cut. But when they are creating the new, no one knows what the right answer is.

I think it is only in hindsight that you can determine whether something is a mistake or not.

I think people make innovation much more complicated than it needs to be.

I think the most important thing to do is to recognize the fundamentally different circumstances of pursuing growth.

It's one of the underappreciated skills required by an innovator - they have to be able to convince lots of people to do things that might not be fully rational (invest in the company, join something that is likely to fail, try a product they've never seen before), and if you can't tell a good story it is just very hard to make that happen.

It's very easy to skip steps when documenting an idea.

It takes a great deal of humility to recognize you have made a wrong turn on the road to successful innovation, but better to stop and try a radically different approach then to continue down the wrong route for too long.

It would be fun too to put some of the great philosophers and political scientists of the past couple centuries into a time machine, have them look at the world today, and see what they think. Imagine Schumpeter, Malthus, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Marx, and more! That would be good fun.

I use the term "fool's gold white space" to highlight a common problem for innovation. People see a market that doesn't exist, and assume that one should exist.

I've come to the conclusion that the core characteristic that separates companies that get innovation from those that don't is a simple word: curiosity.

I've never seen impeccable logic be sufficient to win both the heart and the mind.

Leaders today face challenges for which they are utterly unprepared.

Make sure that you take the time to think about how other companies might respond to your idea, both those companies already in the market you plan to target as well as others that might imagine targeting that market.

Most companies are built to execute today's business model, not discover tomorrow's.

Most startup companies have two people, and they figure out creative ways to swarm problems. They move faster and have more impact.

Mucken Singh works VERY hard on his brawler's physique!

Not only do innovators have to deal with all of the fundamental challenges of innovation, they have to do so in an environment that often is implicitly hostile towards innovation.

Now, I worry a bit about the TEDification of the world where style trumps substance, so hopefully you have a good blend of both!

Of course if you are launching a new business you can thinking about revenues, profits, and so on, but metrics such as customer satisfaction or employee retention might be meaningful if you are focusing more internally.