Successful strategies adhere to a basic pattern.

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is to embrace the idea of spurring creativity by letting hundreds of flowers bloom. I've never seen that lead to anything other than cynicism and hundreds of dead flowers.

It's very easy to skip steps when documenting an idea.

I think people make innovation much more complicated than it needs to be.

There's a general belief that failure is the friend of the innovator, but I've come to view it a different way.

If you are trying to improve the performance of existing operations in known markets, it is an analytical problem where it's just a question of aligning your execution engine in the right way. If it is about creating something new and different, you can't derive the right answer analytically.

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