There's incredible power in pairs. Lennon had McCartney. Anthony had Stanton. Hewlett had Packard. Crick had Watson. So did Holmes. The power of a dynamic duo is that they not only complement, but amplify one another's contributions…

Do you know why WD-40 is called WD-40? Beyond being a warning against putting engineers in charge of branding, the product's name is actually an important lesson for innovation... more on that in a moment.

I just got done hosting the first LaunchPad office hours of the new year. We are interviewing applicants to determine their fit for the program. Each spring quarter, Perry Klebahn and I take 10-15 new teams into the program with the intent to launch real businesses into the world. Over the past 11 years, over 50% of our students' ventures are still in business, have pivoted to another entrepreneurial venture, or have had a profitable exit. Pretty cool stuff…

The origin story of Flamin' Hot Cheetos is one of the most inspiring business tales I've read in a long time. One thing that struck me is how an employee was bold enough to take Frito Lay CEO Roger Enrico's exhortation to "act like an owner" seriously. When we act like an owner, we start contributing to the body of work, rather than simply taking orders…

In the early 1900's Bell Labs laid the foundation for the research institution of the future. What they built, and how they built it, shaped research and development practices around the world. Mervin Kelly was one of the formidable characters who shaped the Lab's development and approach to new products. He believed, as Steve Jobs did as well, that in-person collaboration was nearly impossible to over-emphasize…

One of the key strategies that the unusually successful team at Marvel Comics employs to avoid the sophomore slump on sequels is what an excellent HBR article ("Marvel's Blockbuster Machine") dubs, selecting for "inexperienced experience"…

I received my regular amazon supply delivery today. There are a couple of very simple tools that have helped me in my own creative practice, that I thought to share in case they're helpful to others…

Do you know Claude Shannon? He conceived a little thing called the "bit" (which is also called a "shannon," in his honor) - yeah, that kind of bit. One expert, when pressed to describe his influence on the information age, said, “It’s like saying how much influence the inventor of the alphabet has had on literature." I've been blown away to discover how far ahead of his time he was, and just how unique not only his contributions, but also his methods, were. At just twenty-two years old, he wrote a twenty-five page paper that "would ultimately become known as the most influential master's thesis in history."…

In honor of launching the eleventh batch of d.leaders into their diverse and varied partner organizations in our flagship course, "Leading Disruptive Innovation," I wanted to make a short case for the value of an outsiders' perspective. If you have the time for "the long case," pick yourself a copy of Dave Epstein's exceptional, "Range," which does the job very nicely…

There is a phenomenon so obvious that I hardly dare mention it: inputs to one's thinking drive the outputs of one's thinking. This is a deceptively simple truth, yet truly understanding it unlocks a great secret to creativity: if you're finding creative output hard to come by, then shift your attention to you…

My friend and colleague Bob Sutton often remarks that it's a useful oversimplification to say that, "Innovation = Creativity + Implementation." Which begs the question: what part of this equation matters most? Ideas, or action?…

One of my favorite origin stories: unbeknownst to me, an unlikely collision of my two worlds resulted in a product which has impacted my life almost every single day for the last 11 years…

One of my favorite tactics to tap into the subconscious mind is to nap into the subconscious mind. Edison's "thinking chair" continues to provide both amusement and inspiration. Remember, this is an empirically proven strategy for problem solving...

A mentor of mine was good friends with Robin Williams. He told me how everywhere Robin went, he carried around a yellow legal pad, and he was always writing down ideas. Sometimes pieces of the day's conversation wound up in bits on stage, that night!

You know who else is really into yellow legal pads? Jerry Seinfeld. In fact, that's the premise of his entire book, "Is This Anything?" which is a collection of everything he's ever written down on those pads. One of the things that most struck me in his fantastic conversation with Tim Ferriss was his description of his daily writing process…

There is a phenomenon so obvious that I hardly dare mention it: inputs to one's thinking drive the outputs of one's thinking. This is a deceptively simple truth, yet truly understanding it unlocks a great secret to creativity: if you're finding creative output hard to come by, then shift your attention to your inputs…

"The secret to doing good (work) is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours."

-Amos Tversky, would-be winner of the Nobel Prize, father of behavioral psychology

To me, the unspoken key to Tversky's sentiment is knowing when to "waste" hours; certainly, not all wasted time is created equal. Sometimes folks dawdle when they should be working. But a deliberate diversion, strategically employed, becomes something much more than a waste: it can usher in a breakthrough. Einstein had his violin. Edison had his naps. Franklin had his Junto. Watson and Crick had their coffee. Tversky and Kahneman had their joke-filled-walks…

One study found that most groups never generate more than two ideas in a typical brainstorming session. I'm a big believer in emphasizing quantity as a way to drive quality, so this was deeply troubling to me. I've mentioned the well-established tendency to "declare victory" too quickly, but two ideas??? I mean, come on...

David Kelley often describes the challenge of problem solving in organizations by saying, "Fish don't know they're wet."

This is a somewhat haiku-istic (5 syllables, even!) way of saying that we become oblivious to the basic realities that affect us. This is especially important to acknowledge when we are trying to generate novel solutions, as cognitive biases can create associative barriers that limit ideational potential. If that previous sentence was slightly difficult to understand, then 1) I'm sorry, that's not cool, 2) I'll try to elaborate more at some point, but if you're curious you can learn more about the phenomenon in the classic "Lateral Thinking," or the more recent and very enjoyable "Medici Effect," and 3) definitely don't read the research paper from which the following was taken..

I was struck by Steve Martin's own description of what caused the downfall of his stand-up routine. He was by most accounts the most popular comedian of the day, if not all time, when he abandoned the post.

"This was no longer an experiment; I felt a huge responsibility not to let people down. Arenas of twenty thousand and three-day gigs of forty-five thousand were no place to try out new material. I dabbled with changes, introducing a small addition or mutation here and there, but they were swallowed up by the echoing, cavernous venues...

"The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" describes a key strategic shift that enabled Theodore Vail's celebrated turnaround of AT&T in the early 1900's, as anti-trust regulations threatened to make the innovator a relic. "In Vail's view, another key to AT&T's revival was defining it as a technological leader with legions of engineers working unceasingly to improve the system. As the business historian Louis Galambos would later point out, as Vail's strategy evolved, the company's executives began to imagine how their company might adapt its technology not only for the near term but for a future far, far away: 'Eventually it came to be assumed within the Bell System that there would never be a time when technological innovation would no longer be needed.' The Vail strategy, in short, would measure the company's progress 'in decades instead of years.’”…