Book Excerpts
These posts are the full-text excerpt from my book, Beyond The Obvious. Here, I discuss the idea of “thinking outside the box” and how it can help you innovate better. It is my hope that by reading these posts, readers can learn how to think differently and develop innovative ideas. I also provide examples from my journey as an innovator so readers can get a real-world perspective on creativity and innovation. Thanks for reading!
To See Your Assumptions Act Like An Outsider
The problem with trying to be the “outsider” is that most of us aren’t outsiders. We are inside—inside our company, our industry, or our organization. There’s a delicate balancing act between being the person who can speak the confrontational, difficult truths, and the person who can speak these sam
To Innovate You Need To Question Your Assumptions
Every year I travel around the world giving workshops and motivational talks on innovation. I enjoy doing this; I’m a naturally curious person, and there’s always something interesting to observe and learn from these speaking dates. Often I’ll walk into an auditorium full of people wondering if they
The Power of Questions And How To Use It!
I’ve been fascinated by the power of questions, either good or bad, for my entire professional life. The more I thought about them, the more I began to notice how people used them. I started to see how some people had the innate ability to formulate and pose questions that propelled others to make i
Building and Testing The Killer Questions
I started collecting the Killer Questions when I was in my short-lived “retirement” early in 2001. As I relaxed in the Virginian countryside, my mind started to flash back to various experiences I’d had during my working life. Over the course of the preceding twenty years I’d seen dozens of highly i
Why Do Questions Matter For Your Success?
One day when my kids were still little I was sitting in the car with my daughter Tara. She was about four years old at the time, and as we drove down the street she noticed the curb along the side of the road and got curious about it. Suddenly I was fielding question after […]
Is The Current Innovation Refresh Rate A Good Thing?
As the retired CTO of a major technology company, I was surrounded by visual clues that clearly indicate when a tech product is headed to the gadget graveyard. Most of the time, it’s hard to ignore these clues, because they are pretty obvious. I see them in meetings with my coworkers or customers wh
Are There Bad Questions And Good Questions?
The more I started to look at questions and how essential they are to fostering creativity and innovation, the more I realized that there are bad questions and there are good questions. And within those good questions, some just aren’t relevant to the process of ideation. The key is to develop the a
Ideas? Don’t give up on them
Once everyone is settled into the meeting, it’s time to share what you’ve discovered. I generally give a quick recap of our area of focus, not about the ideas yet. I start off by asking the participants to share their own list of the assumptions and rules that define how the industry and organizati
Group dynamics and ranking
Before we start ranking I want you to think about group dynamics for a second. Ideally you will have somewhere between five and ten people participating in your ideation group. These people will be drawn from all divisions of your company, including, but not limited to, engineering, marketing, and e
How To Prepare For The Unexpected Jolts
If assumptions keep you safe, comfortable, and stagnant, then jolts are their counterpart. Jolts are the earthquakes and the tsunamis, metaphorical and occasionally literal, that you either don’t or can’t see coming. Jolts can be terrifying; one day you wake up and a fundamental assumption about how
