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"Curiosity is an incredible tool. But what I realized, what really inspired my desire to write A Curious Mind with Charles Fishman, is that most people don't use their curiosity with a sense of purpose and understanding—with insight about curiosity itself.
Curiosity is the key to understanding people's personalities and motivations.
Curiosity is a vital storytelling tool—and storytelling is the best way to engage and persuade other people, in your work life and your personal life.
Curiosity is a fantastic source of courage.
Curiosity is the best, most under-used management tool—a great way to create engagement in your fellow works, but also a great way to transmit values and priorities.
Curiosity is the spark for creativity and innovation, the best long-term investment you can make.
Curiosity is the best way to stay connected to those who are most important to you.
Curiosity, in fact, turns out to be a quiet superpower that all of us have. You don't need an Ivy League education to use it, you don't need a high-speed Internet connection.
What's curiosity done for you lately? We're betting it hasn't done enough."
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"Ask any manager on planet Earth, 'What is your key challenge?' and among many different responses one will strike you with remarkable consistency: Staying afloat. The fast-moving roller-coaster economy we live in today makes this task increasingly difficult. Just as we handle one crisis, another looms around the corner. How can we sustain—and even thrive?
The answer is the one you've heard before: We must consistently remake who we are, what we offer, and how we deliver our offerings to the world. Put it simply, we must reinvent.
What you may not have heard before is this: Today, the frequency with which our reinvention must take place is staggering. Essentially, we must become a new company every three years.
In fact, we must reinvent so frequently and so radically that the traditional roles and processes inside of an organization cannot keep up. It's time to make reinvention into its own profession. The Ten Commandments are here to help you with this task. Spoiler alert: all hail the Chief Reinvention Officer!"
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"Ask yourself: why is it so few organizations ever achieve performance even remotely close to their potential, much less that of their aspirations? Why is it so few organizations succeed through their second or third generation of leadership? Why are so few workplaces truly "great places to work"?
Is it because their leaders are stupid, their people incompetent, or their strategies inept? Did all those executives running formerly dominant companies such as Blackberry, Nokia, RadioShack or Kodak never get the memo about The Innovator's Dilemma? Is it simply not possible for most organizations to do fundamentally better? Or is all this just a matter of bad luck or fate, or the natural consequence of business Darwinism?
We don't think so. A big part of the answer is that most organizations and the executives who run them don't recognize, respect or leverage the reality and potential of the one resource every organization and management team create every day: failure—the other 'F' word."
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"It has come like a thunderbolt. Some of our most esteemed companies in the new economy woke up and discovered that their workforce was overwhelmingly male (70% at Google, for example) and it was difficult to find more than a handful of women at the top. These companies recognize this is a big problem, and they plan to do something serious to change it, at least if we go by the amount of resources devoted to remedying the imbalance. [...]
These biases are not intentional, but instead arise from cultural assumptions and organizational practices that can inadvertently put women at a disadvantage. Since they are unintentional and often invisible, these biases can be hard to address. The first task is to identify them in your organization. There are certain places to look –unconscious bias in hiring and promotion, opportunity structures that channel women and men into different functions, conceptions that an ideal worker is available 24/7, among others. Once we've identified them, the next challenge how can we alter them. When individuals negotiate a change in practice they create what we call small wins. These small wins for individuals can aggregate and begin to chip away at institutional barriers."
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"Since the Industrial Revolution, new counting and communications technologies have altered the structure and management of business. ... Yet the guiding metric of management for decades has remained the same: finance. With improvements in communications and computing, financial performance can be measured faster and in greater detail than before. But it is still a fairly blunt, crude measurement—counting money, one factor of production and output of the enterprise. It is still financial capitalism. But big data promises to usher in a new phase in the practice of management."
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