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

The need to be thoughtful about experiment design is particularly acute within large companies, since some of the behaviors, such as having small teams and tapping into low-cost resources to maximize flexibility, won't come naturally to many people inside huge companies.

Creating the new increasingly is more than 50 percent of a top leader's job.

Why do people do crossword puzzles? There's no reward for completing one, but some people just like the challenge.

History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that's penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational.

In my mind, so-called "cultures of innovation" really boil down to one word: curiosity.

If you work on a new product launch, spent time in a new geography, or work to develop a completely new skill, you have no choice but to figure out new ways to solve problems.