1. That’s “jobs-to-be-done analysis to figure out a customer value proposition with a strategic opportunity area for a strategic dialogue.” I’m not sure whether that makes more or less sense!

2. This example is detailed in my 2014 book, The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas into the Market (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

3. See “Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel,” http://www.solarnavigator.net/inventors/wright_brothers_wind_tunnel.htm.

1. I did have to do a little research to confirm that the concert was in fact on a Saturday. Thanks, setlist.fm! From this Web site, I learned that my concert was one of ten times that Pearl Jam has played “Timeless Melody” by The La’s, live. The wonderful uselessness of the Internet certainly makes writing books more pleasurable. And greetings to footnote readers. You’ll note the footnotes here are not academic references—they are parenthetical or personal comments. Unless otherwise presented in the footnote, the full bibliographic details of any source discussed in this book are given in the appendix and endnotes.

2. In my year, there were two 80-student sections of what became known as BSSE, both taught by Christensen. In the 2009–2010 academic year, there were seven 100-student sections, with a four-person team of Christensen and three well-regarded former executives teaching the course. In other words, more than 75 percent of the 880 students who constituted the HBS Class of 2010 took BSSE. I was what the innovation literature would call an early adopter.

3. That team went on to win the 2000–2001 NCAA Championship, with Christensen’s son Matt averaging 8.4 minutes, 2.6 points, and 1.3 rebounds a game during the regular season. Matt would later work with us at Innosight for a few years before going to HBS himself and forming a company called Rose Park Advisors to do equity investing based on his father’s research.

4. Time for a bit of Anthony family lore. The Nintendo was the first purchase that I made with money I actually earned (aside from allowance money). My source of income? Mowing lawns. My first lawn gig (at age twelve) occurred thanks to the wonders of an alphabetical school directory. Someone called up and asked if I mowed lawns. I asked my parents if I mowed lawns. They said sure. They provided the capital equipment (the mower); I got to keep the proceeds. A few weeks later, Mario was all mine!

5. The application was what was known at the time as a “BBS door.” It let people participate in NFL pools, competing to see who could correctly pick the outcomes of each week’s game. If I recall correctly, the free version was completely random; the subscription version allowed you to enter in the real schedule. I can’t recall if I actually cashed that sole registration check.

6. I went 0-for-3 at Stanford—not making the cut at its business school or at an executive education program (it claimed it didn’t allow consultants). I now have a theory that the business schools at Harvard and Stanford implicitly collude to keep their yields (the percentage of admitted students who accept admittance) high by having Harvard take all the students with even social security numbers. I also am skeptical that the moon landing happened. Seriously.

7. That’s not a joke, sadly. For those who are not fans of American football, Madden was the coach of the Oakland Raiders in the 1970s and a well-regarded television announcer from 1979 to 2008. He also licensed his name to a popular line of Electronic Arts videogames.

1. To be fair, the article at blogginginnovation.com was a collection of suggestions from readers. But the definitions sure ran the gamut. You had something as simple as “Value + Creativity + Execution” and something as complicated as “Creativity is what happens when imagination has focus; innovation is what happens when creativity has a bottom line; enterprise is what happens when innovation meets ability, entrepreneurship is what happens when all the aforementioned are put on the same cart and passion becomes the fuel.” I do recommend reading this blog, by the way.

2. This example came out of 2007 work we did with Linkage, a leading executive training company based in Burlington, Massachusetts. We were trying to simplify our materials so that Linkage-trained instructors could teach it to wider audiences inside companies. One of the members of the Linkage team developed this comparison.

3. In 2001, I accompanied my grandfather to the American Association of Accountants meeting in Atlanta. His sight was failing him, so I was there to help him get around. People generally looked at him with the kind of awe that a rock star might receive. It was surreal and was the first time I realized the esteem with which my grandfather was held in his profession.

4. I’m betting that Larsson stays in pop culture for at least a few more years as Hollywood turns his books into movies. When I first started telling this story in 2005, I used John Grisham; by 2007, I was using the Harry Potter books. The world changes fast!

5. One of my favorite moments was visiting Turner Broadcasting’s corporate headquarters and seeing the World Series trophy from the Atlanta Braves’ 1995 season (the team was owned by Turner Broadcasting at the time). I also had an unsuccessful quest to get a Ted Turner bobble-head doll. If you have one, let me know.

6. If you thought renowned pediatrician Dr. Ferber was tough, you should meet my sister. There is no wavering in the Anthony method. It is, however, quite effective. My sister, who provided tons of help on this book, made me promise to note that she is a good human being. She is.

7. Of course, my sister doesn’t always tell people she plans to use their stories. Beware about giving Michelle personal details—because they will be shared with others!

8. The founder of Gillette was a gentleman named King Gillette. You see that clever word play? Just wait until you see what is coming in a few sentences.

9. Get it—sharply better performance. From a razor blade. Ha! I will try to not have two footnotes in a paragraph again.

10. The corporate life-expectancy figure is based on research done by Richard Foster (discussed in more detail in the next chapter). Foster analyzed the annual turnover in the S&P 500 index, whose five hundred committee-selected members cover about 75 percent of the market capitalization of U.S. equity markets. In his 2001 book Creative Destruction, Foster found that the turnover had been increasing steadily over the past sixty years. We updated the analysis in August 2010. Up until the 1960s, the average turnover was running about 2 to 3 percent (corresponding to a forty-to fifty-year life span). Today, that figure is about 5 to 6 percent (corresponding to a fifteen-to twenty-year life span).

11. One colleague became a legend for figuring out how to get the Audix system to time-stamp a message so that it appeared as though she was working insane hours.

12. My favorite low-cost tools are Google SketchUp (for design), SurveyMonkey (to gather data), Skype (for communications), LinkedIn (to find industry experts), UpWork (which helps you find freelance talent), Wix.com (for designing Web sites), Google AdWords (for targeted marketing), and legalzoom.com (for basic legal services). There are tons more.

1. For example, the field wouldn’t be where it is today without the historical contributions of academics like Henry Mintzberg, Robert Burgelman, Michael Tushman, James Utterback, C. K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel, Joseph Bower, W. Chan Kim, and Renée Mauborgne; more recent research by Constantinos C. Markides, Ron Adner, Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, C. C. Hang, and Don Sull; and writings of leading-edge practitioners like Larry Doblin and Geoffrey Moore.

2. McKinsey trains people to never reveal the names of their clients. So everyone at or around McKinsey knows precisely which company this is—Foster even names it in Creative Destruction. But I’ll hold to the code and force you to look it up if you would like to.

3. You know, everyone on this list and with whom I’ve had the fortune of interacting comes across as a good human being. It reminds me of a theory that Bill James advanced about baseball players. The defensive wizards like Ozzie Smith and Brooks Robinson have reputations as affable, good-natured people. Hitting specialists like Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, and Albert Belle have reputations as self-centered jerks. James argued that any player whose biggest strength is their defense knows that he only succeeds by having great teammates, so he becomes a great teammate. Perhaps there’s something about the field of innovation and its focus on creation that attracts the right sort of people.

4. My family had season tickets to the Orioles between 1984 and 1998. By my count, I’ve been to more than five hundred baseball games. Some key memories include two World Series (1983, 2007), four league championship series (1983, 1997, 1998, 2008), two no-hitters (Juan Nieves and Wilson Alvarez), the games where Cal Ripken Jr. tied and broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak, the last game at Memorial Stadium, the first game at Camden Yards, and the August 24, 1983, game where Tippy Martinez picked off three overeager base runners in one inning. (Truth be told, I listened to the end of the game on the radio because staying to the end of the game would have been a bit much for an eight-year-old! See www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1983/B08240BAL1983.htm for the details.)

5. HBR did a great job massaging my 5,000-word piece into a tight 2,300 words. If you are interested in the full treatment, feel free to shoot me an e-mail at [email protected].

6. Hillary Clinton spoke at lunch the day I was there. The journalists buzzed about the chicken that was served.

7. You can see a recap of the event at Scott D. Anthony, “Game-Changing at Procter & Gamble,” Strategy & Innovation 6, no. 4 (July–August 2008), www.innosight.com/documents/protected/SI/JulyAugust2008StrategyandInnovation.pdf.

8. Perhaps that was because we had trained Charlie to greet Lafley by saying, “Thank you for my diapers,” which my son dutifully did!

9. You really should read Mauboussin to get the answers, but in short, he suggests that the answers to those three questions are, respectively, yes a company can influence its shareholder set; persistence exists, but barely; and investment performance is mostly (but not entirely) luck.

1. If you want to blow your mind, read Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, by Barry Schwartz (New York: Ecco, 2004)—it describes how more choices actually leave us worse off.

2. Always good to have a bit of onomatopoeia in one’s prose, even if thunk isn’t a real word. I hope that its meaning is obvious—thunk value is something that makes a satisfying noise when dropped from a height of about eighteen inches onto a table. Consultants like to make sure their PowerPoint presentations have high thunk value.

3. Wikipedia tells us that von Moltke (the younger) was a German general who played a part in setting the stage for World War I.

4. I am convinced that the best chapter in two of my three previous books was the conclusion. This is sad, because no one gets to the conclusion. I am trying consciously to break the trend in this book (though the conclusion is cool—I promise).

5. I’m at least told that this is the case. The last time I ran a mile was in seventh grade, when I was about six inches shorter and the same weight as I am now. It wasn’t really running as much as it was, in its best light, walking briskly. I believe my time was about eighteen minutes. Roger Bannister I am not.

6. I’m pretty sure this is an homage to how in 1992, presidential candidate Ross Perot said that signing the North American Free Trade Agreement would lead to a “giant sucking sound” of jobs moving from the United States to Mexico. But for the life of me, I can’t remember when I first used the phrase. Nor can I remember if I actually borrowed it from an infinitely more eloquent colleague or client.

1. I will freely admit that I don’t know what a merchant bank is, either.

2. I debated for a good six minutes whether it was a Sneetch’s belly or a Sneetches’ belly, or even a Sneetches’s belly. I don’t think Strunk & White provides clear guidance on that one.

1. You know why you get so much junk mail? Because it works. As long as about one in a hundred customers takes action, direct mail is a very cost-effective form of marketing.

2. Clearly, the newspaper industry suffered from the innovator’s paradox as well. Despite all the stories about the industry’s demise in the late 1990s, the industry looked stronger and more profitable in the early 2000s than before the commercialization of the Internet. Of course, lurking underneath the surface were powerful forces that would lead to dramatic change—most of it for the negative.

3. Yet another example of saving the best for last. I wonder how many people actually read the conclusion of Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth, Seeing What’s Next? I swear, it’s pretty good.

4. This quote has appeared in a range of Innosight-authored books, but no one has ever found documented proof that Levitt actually said this. He did write “Marketing Myopia,” which appeared in Harvard Business Review in 1960, however, and it is amazing how fifty years after the article’s publication, it still rings powerfully and painfully true for many readers.

5. Those topics are explored in my 2012 and 2014 books Building a Growth Factory (with David S. Duncan) and The First Mile.

6. Remember the old adage, “Success has many siblings but failure is an orphan”? I’ve met literally hundreds of people inside P&G who claim to have worked on the Swiffer, and dozens of design companies and research agencies. For the record, I had absolutely nothing to do with the Swiffer, though we were early adopters in 1999, as my wife (then girlfriend) found that it was the only way to get me involved in cleaning our Cambridge apartment.

7. I joined Media General’s board of directors in April 2009.

8. One of my favorite Malcolm Gladwell essays describes Ron Popeil. See Malcolm Gladwell, “The Pitchman,” New Yorker, October 30, 2000, 64, http://gladwell.com/the-pitchman/.

9. Direct response refers to the infomercial’s goal of getting people to call a phone number to order the product.

1. More than 250 teams entered the contest. Remarkably, the team that cracked the code was dispersed around the globe, and its members had never met until they received their check.

2. At least I think I said that. Google has no record of its ever being published. However, I did most definitely write about promiscuity in a 2009 blog and have used that line in speeches. See Scott D. Anthony, “My Best Innovation Advice? Be Promiscuous,” hbr.org, September 23, 2009, http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2009/09/my_best_innovation_advice_be_p.html.

3. My wife had never visited Singapore before we moved out in 2010. She is brave, mostly for trusting me to find a place to live.

4. My father was also the creator of the ill-fated Darwin’s Drill. He would go to the back porch with a plate of leftovers, yell “Darwin’s Drill!,” and throw the food into the backyard. The strongest got the food. The weakest went hungry. My mother didn’t let this one last.

5. The Innovator’s Dilemma actually used the term disruptive technology, but Christensen defined technology in such an expansive way that he appropriately rebranded the concept disruptive innovation in later writing. Christensen will now privately admit regret for using the word disruptive, as people often confuse what he intended by this term with common dictionary definitions.

6. One thing we should create but haven’t is the gold standard “disruptive database” that lists every certified disruptive development we can find. The Innovator’s Solution had a pretty comprehensive list of developments up until about 2000. We produced a special issue of our newsletter in 2007 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma highlighting more recent developments. Highlights from that special issue can be found in Clayton Christensen and Innosight, “Decade of Disruption,” Forbes.com, October 26, 2007, www.forbes.com/2007/08/31/christensen-disruption-kodak-pf-guru_in_cc_0904christensen_inl.html.

7. Unless you live in Asia, in which case you would probably have noted Tencent or Baidu, both of which also fit this pattern.

8. Favorites of the Anthony-family children include Subway Surfers, Dumb Ways to Die, and anything Lego-related.

9. Michelle Anthony and Reyna Lindert, Little Girls Can Be Mean: Four Steps to Bully-Proof Girls in the Early Grades (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010).

10. The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, chapter 5, has an example of an idea résumé.

11. If any of the terms in the list are unfamiliar, check out Howard Stevenson et al., The Entrepreneurial Venture, 2nd ed., Practice of Management Series (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999); or Robert Higgins, Analysis for Financial Management, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008). You can also get some general definitions from Wikipedia.

1. To those few souls who are regular readers, I do apologize for using this story so frequently. It has the double advantage of being a legitimately good story and one for which I actually have approval to go into the nitty-gritty details.

2. It turns out, sadly, that human beings are pretty bad at doing this. The literature calls it planning fallacy. We always think things will be quicker and cheaper than they are. We do indeed live in Lake Wobegon, where all the people think they are above average.

3. If you are an avid Anthony blog reader, then you will recognize this day’s guidance. Many of the chapters from the book pick up fragments that I’ve written on my blog or in one of my books. But this blog post was my most read by a wide margin, so this is pretty much a word-for-word replication. And I got to include a shameless plug for my blog! Check it out at http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony.

4. You know, I never once have managed to actually see the image.

5. It turned out that almost no one asked for a refund.

6. In fact, both of us found that the last few weeks in Boston were among the most pleasant of our ten years in the city. At least part of the reason for this is that my wife is just insanely organized.

7. For curious readers, Innosight does in fact go beyond providing innovation advice. Over the past few years we have incubated or invested in about a dozen businesses in our “Innosight Ventures” unit.

8. In my travels in Asia, I have found that MacGyver is a surprisingly well-understood cultural reference. For those who don’t know it, MacGyver was a television show in the 1980s and 1990s whose eponymous protagonist had a stunning ability to use a Swiss Army knife, duct tape, and readily available materials to create contraptions that saved him from certain death.

9. Don’t worry, the story doesn’t end with me in a bathtub missing my kidneys.

10. That’s from the song “The Boxer.” Great thanks to Robert I. Sutton, who quotes Simon in Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best … and Learn from the Worst (New York: Business Plus, 2010). Sutton also quotes a study that shows how National Basketball Association teams will keep playing players who were drafted early even if objective statistics in professional contests suggest that they are duds. As a Washington Wizards fan, I would call this the Kwame Brown phenomenon.

11. Tantalizing, isn’t it? I’m still not telling what category this is really about. Ask me in 2020.

1. You may note that many how-to tips draw from analyzing successful and failed innovation efforts. As a rule, companies should conduct after-action reviews to capture what worked and what didn’t work for a particular effort.

2. The plot bears some striking similarities to The Simpsons movie, which was released in 2007. King apparently started working on his novel in the late 1970s, however.

3. To my younger readers: TV Guide used to be a powerhouse media brand, with weekly circulation at its peak of close to 20 million. That isn’t a typo. Of course, the Internet changed that.

4. Most zombie movies are references to the pernicious impact that the pale glow of television has on society. My favorite zombie book: Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Crown, 2006). My favorite zombie movie: 28 Days Later.

5. Even worse, it seems that languages just aren’t one of my areas of strength. I studied Spanish for about fifteen years, and today I can ask, “Can I have a beer, please?” and “Where is the bathroom?” These are useful phrases, no doubt (and one necessitates the other), but pretty poor output from fifteen years of education.

6. I’m sure some of you are wondering, “Doesn’t that mean Sheets suffered from adverse selection, in that the only people who could say yes on the spot probably weren’t very good?” Look at it from the other perspective. Perhaps the best people for the job were people who might be floundering in the core business because they were better wired for more innovative endeavors.

7. There really is a Web site for everything. See Wizards of Odds, “Blackjack: Expected Return for Every Play,” May 31, 2010, http://wizardofodds.com/blackjack/appendix1.html. A $50 bet would be expected to be worth the following, depending on whether the player stays or hits: with 15 points in the first hand and the dealer having 10, the average player could expect to lose $27.02 if he or she stayed; $25.20 if he or she hit. For the second hand, with a total of 18 points and the dealer showing 5, players could expect to win $9.98 if they stayed or to lose $30.77 if they hit.

8. I learned about this in Michael Mauboussin’s Think Twice. For more of this type of analysis, see www.footballoutsiders.com.

9. Bessemer Venture Partners, Portfolio, “Anti-Portfolio,” www.bvp.com/Portfolio/AntiPortfolio.aspx.

10. No, I am not naming names here, either. I will just say that this was not a company that went on to receive bailouts. It actually did quite well in 2008 and 2009.

11. Ms. Sussman, my eighth-grade English teacher, would be sad that I ended a sentence with a preposition. But I would tell Ms. Sussman that Winston Churchill, upon seeing one of his sentences changed so as not to end with a preposition, allegedly wrote, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.” There seems to be a Churchill story for every occasion (whether this story is true or not is unclear); see Paul Brians, “Ending a Sentence with a Preposition,” in Common Errors in English Usage, http://www.public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.txt.

12. Fred Brushley is a pseudonym, and the story is disguised a bit to protect the protagonist, who was a bit worried that his company might not be so keen on his experiment.

1. “I promise to do my best to … report for duty on time, perform my duties faithfully, strive to prevent accidents, always setting a good example myself, obey my teachers and officers of the patrol, report dangerous student practices, strive to earn the respect of fellow students.” Thanks, World Wide Web!