How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?

And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. ... When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.

Breaking an old business model is always going to require leaders to follow their instinct. There will always be persuasive reasons not to take a risk. But if you only do what worked in the past, you will wake up one day and find that you’ve been passed by.

If the technology is disruptive, on the other hand, the odds are that at the end of the transition, the leaders will have been toppled and new companies will be on top.

Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.

In general, the questions that are on our mind are the same questions that have been driving our work over the past decade. How do we bring order to this messy, unpredictable world of innovation? How can we dramatically improve the chances of creating a successful new-growth business? How can we do this again and again? More specifically, it has become very clear that the fundamental paradigms of market segmentation and branding are badly broken - and we're working on developing more useful theories for these dimensions of innovation.

In the study of management, unfortunately, many writers have been so anxious to articulate a theory in the form of, "If you do this, this will result," that they never go through this careful effort.