Unproven

Gordon Gekko says it clearly in the acclaimed film Wall Street, “Most of these Harvard MBA types - they don't add up to dogshit. Give me guys that are poor, smart, hungry - and no feelings. You win a few, you lose a few, but you keep on fighting. And if you need a friend, get a dog.”




What are the authentic ingredients to achieve innovations that transcend and generate value? Honestly, when I talk to people, I bet more on attitude than on aptitude. Too much aptitude makes you impatient and arrogant. I prefer, sincerely, to have the scale tipped toward attitude from lack, need, ambition, and towards commitment.

When we talk about products or business models, like Kawasaki points out, we should not obsess, either. This does not mean making a bad product, but rather, “innovation may contain some not so good elements.” Twitter has tons of mistakes, but it is changing people’s habits. The first Mac had many things that needed improvement, but it established what the future would look like in personal computing, and it did not need a long wait to get there.

Great, world-changing companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple, eBay, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and YouTube had no proven teams, no proven technologies, and no proven business models.

Thinking backwards, deconstructing what successful business models, as well as their products and the leaders behind them, have looked like, opens up to opportunity, in this section, to prove the authentic value of the unproven. Ignorance is not only bliss, it’s also empowering!

A luminous idea can die quicker in the hands of a conservative than a mediocre idea in the hands of a freethinker.

Failure is not another step backwards; it is one step less towards proving your theory or learning something that will open new opportunities.