When you are motivating people to do amazing things, you have to win over both their rational side and their emotive side.

I feel for today's leaders. I really do. They got to where they are by doing a series of jobs exceptionally well. And that doesn't help them at all with the challenges they now face.

Data about an innovative idea is rarely crystal clear.

We fool ourselves into thinking that the spreadsheets that capture our financial projections are something different than what they are.

People will try to copy what they can see, which is the final product or service, but it's much harder to see (and copy) all the intricacies of the business model that allows you to create, capture, and deliver value. And that's what you need to get right to really jam something down people's throats!

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.

The CEO should ask what he or she can do to raise the organization's curiosity quotient. One way to do this is to seek to learn more about current or prospective customers, not to figure out which segmentation model to slot them into, but to really understand them as human beings. Another is to live at the intersections where innovation magic occurs.