All too often, executives expect every new idea or experiment to yield a big payoff. Such an expectation... makes a company overly conservative, and will quickly drain the portfolio of ideas and... of experiments of many interesting strategic options.

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You have to train people how to be business innovators. If you don't train them, the quality of the ideas that you get in an innovation marketplace is not likely to be high.

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Innovation will always be a mixture of serendipity, genius, and sheer bull-mindedness. But while you can't bottle lightning, you can build lightning rods. Non-linear innovation can be legitimized, fostered, supported, and rewarded.

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Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It's the only insurance against irrelevance. It's the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It's the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy.

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This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.

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In an increasingly non-linear economy, incremental change is not enough � you have to build a capacity for strategy innovation, one that increases your ability to recognize new opportunities.

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One way ofbuilding private foresight out of public data is looking where others aren't...if you want to see the future, go to an industry confab and get the list of what was talked about. Then ask, 'What did people never talk about?' That's where you're going to find opportunity.

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Developing a sound and healthy organization requires understanding the environment as much as understanding the organization.

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In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

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Challenging the status quo has to be the starting point for anything that goes under the label of strategy.

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