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

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

Every great idea emerges out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation.

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.

When we are looking at ideas, we really are thinking of three things. Are you doing something that seems consistent with the patterns of success? Are there reasons to believe you have or can access the right people to make it happen? Can we play a unique role in enabling success? We all have our rules of thumb, I suppose.

The school at which you studied - design school, disruptive school, TRIZ school, user-centered innovation school, etc - determines the specific words you use.

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