Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature but the real cause of lots of resistance often is that however much a team might say that it wants to change, the old assumptions are woven, invisibly, deep within the corporate culture, and from this staging ground they act invisibly to sustain the old order. Finding the assumption out and then rooting them out is a special skill. It calls for assumption hunters, I call them.

The world of the consumer, the sheer innovation and dynamism of our culture has never been easy for marketing to keep up with, but now these are suddenly faster and much more powerful. We need a new idea and practice of marketing and of the brand.

Now that everyone is reinventing and innovating, advantage goes to those who keep at it. We need to greet even success with humility.

You need to begin where people are. You can't punt ideas or innovations in from the 40 yard line. And yes, the work should feel so collaborative that it should feel like the end result belongs to everyone. Your best moment as a consultant is when your client plays your idea back to you as their idea. Your job: to nod sagely and say, "that's an excellent idea.".

Often it takes more time to explain a task than to do it yourself, and when you do it yourself there is no data lost in transmission. We have something to learn about how communication works in these settings. Sometimes it takes a really long time to communicate the full meaning of what we want to say.

Often creativity comes from a very pragmatic kind of "well, what if we try this. How about this." You set some parameters and then work through the variations. It's hard to see something as a concept. It literally comes out of the hands on experiment.

Innovation got hip. It got cool. I prefer the people who investigate the world out a brute sense of curiosity, a fundamental sense of play.