Max McKeown

The smart strategist allows strategy to be shaped by events. Good reactions can make great strategy. Strategy involves competition of goals, and the risk is the difference between those goals and the ability of the organization to achieve them. So part of the risk is created by the strategy.

Nowists get off on getting on, so they run when they could walk, jump when they could sit and dance when they could sit at the edge. They regret inaction, so simply act.

Strategy is about shaping the future.

Strategy was first used in Athens (508 BC) to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytic side of strategy.

We need to move from comparative advantage to perpetual advantage...

The true parents of creativity are curiosity and necessity.

If there are no new ideas, there is no innovation. And if there is no creativity, there are no new ideas.

Plug into the anti-obvious power of the rebel. Or get those opposing minds to plug into your purpose, to solve your problem, to reimagine your process.

Problem-insight precedes solution insight. Someone has to recognise a problem before they start to solve the problem...

If traditional doesn't work, then traditions won't do.

Innovation is about practical creativity - it's about making new ideas useful...

Innovation can start with wanting what does not yet exist - and finding a solution - or seeing what does not yet exist - and finding an opportunity.

The psychology of individual creativity is about at least three different things. First, creativity is about thinking differently. Second, creativity is about feeling differently. Third, creativity is about focusing, or committing, differently.

Before innovation - or practical creativity - there is insight. You must see the world differently.

Culture is the sum of the values, beliefs and assumptions of human groups.

As an innovator, you need to be aware of how traditions, habits and bias can act as barriers to accepting new ideas.

Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.

All we've got is Now. Life, composed of a billion moments, from our first to our last thoughts.