“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” — Albert Einstein You would think by publishing a book entitled Winning the Brain ...

The best way to combat a cognitive bias is to have awareness of its existence and how you or those around you will react to certain informational stimuli. In business, these cognitive biases can actually work in your favor as you provide people with justification for their shopping decisions.

Obviously the stock market, and more importantly, the economy in general has a big impact on innovation.   But whether or not it makes sense from a long term vision, investment in innovation is often one of the first places to get hit when money gets tight.  We have all got somewhat used to a goldilocks stock market. It’s not ...

The proper motivation… For a long time it was accepted that incentives, and specifically financial incentives, would motivate any type of desired business behavior. In other words–everyone has a price. There are two main types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within the task itself, and directly by the value of the benefit from completing it. Extrinsic motivation has nothing to ...

The world is filled with threats to your success, but the greatest of these is much closer to home than you might think. I’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses during my career, and in all of those interactions one thing is the greatest determinant of success, the founders ability to overcome their own fear of achieving ...

Take any great idea and you can find no shortage of people who think they had it first. And it’s quite possible they did. History is full of examples of nearly simultaneous discovery. David Hilbert discovered general relativity at about the same time Einstein did. Alexander Graham Bell only narrowly beat Elisha Gray to the patent office. Yet the debate ...

“Try to give up one of each of these behaviors for the 20 remaining weeks of 2015 and I guarantee that you will be more successful and much happier.” Many things that we value in life are the result of accumulating stuff; experience, wealth, and education all come from adding more to what we have. By contrast, the act of ...

Most Americans don’t even come close to getting enough sleep. The average in the USA is 6.8 hours, and in my anecdotal experience, many people working in high pressure, ‘innovation on demand’ jobs probably get considerably less than that. But a couple of studies suggest very strongly that sleep may be even more important for innovators than for most other ...

No one and no organization has a perfect record when it comes to releasing new products into the market. Failures are frequent — around 40% or so depending on the industry — and they happen at small companies, big companies, and experienced companies, including Pepsi. In this interview, you’ll learn a simple and profound concept that every product manager and ...

In front of me sit 40 six sigma “black belts,” appraising me warily, all squinty-eyed and knit-browed. I’ve been asked to give them an introduction to design thinking. I don’t have a six sigma belt of any color. I fully admit that I wouldn’t know the difference between a six and any other number sigma. I have decided to tee ...