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21 " It’s significant that the revenue generated by the large numbers of small bets Howard Schultz made after retaking control of Starbucks is almost equal to the company’s total annual profit. In a good year Starbucks earns about one billion dollars on revenues of ten billion; the incremental revenue generated by his many small bets exceeds the company’s total average annual profits. A strong argument can be made that without the many small bets he made—excluding their potential effect on future revenues and profits—the company would still be struggling to make a profit. "
― Jason Jennings , The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change
22 " A small business with a handful of employees might be able to handle two or three concurrent small bets, while a large company with thousands of employees should probably be considering hundreds of potential small bets and implementing scores of them. "
23 " Make as many small bets as you have people responsible for making them happen and sufficient financial resources to maximize the odds of success. If there aren’t enough resources to give the small bet a chance, you’ll never know if it might have worked out or been a possible home run. "
24 " Have some general backup ideas in mind, but don’t let the backup plan be carved in stone. That will prevent you from learning. The time to begin building formalized backup plans is during the tweaking, changing, and maneuvering that occurs while studying the results of the small bet. Backup plans become vital when a small bet that’s turned out to be successful is about to be scaled in size. "
25 " A culture of small bets is a learning culture in which people discover the right paths to new destinations. In these organizations work is often less like executing a blueprint and more like crossing a fast-moving stream by jumping from rock to rock. Decisions are made in the moment, without perfect information, and people experiment by changing variables, staying in motion, and conquering their fears, with the ultimate destination always clear in their mind’s eye. “This takes skills we don’t learn in school, even business school,” author Peter Sims explains. "
26 " SMART is an acronym you need to remember every time you make a small bet. It stands for specific, measurable, accountable, resourced, and timed. Specific: There is a detailed destination. In the previous example, SMART starts with specifically how many customers they wanted to find and how that justifies spending two hundred thousand dollars. Measurable: Create a detailed road map with markers from the destination back to the starting point—in this case from the number of customers sold back to the number of prospects needing to be contacted. Accountable: Decide who is responsible at every checkpoint in the road map. Resourced: Answer the tough questions. Is there enough time, money, and experience budgeted? It’s important to realize that the three are interdependent, so the lack of any one means you’ll need more of the other two. Timed: Adhere to deadlines every step of the way so that someone can track the follow-through and know that what’s expected is getting done. "
27 " The fact is most people come to work with a spark of creativity and a desire to help the cause. But along the way, that spark gets extinguished. The solution is to adopt a “no skunking” principle among mangers and senior personnel. Skunking is defined as spraying negativity on the creative spark in a coworker or subordinate. It can be an impatient look that says, “That’s a dumb question,” or a conversation-killing shot like, “We tried that and it didn’t work. "
28 " Customers, knowingly or not, seek an experience to accompany the product or service they’re purchasing, and the business that offers the best experience in that category wins. "
29 " When a company is growing it is more likely to acknowledge the importance of its vendors and suppliers and treat them fairly. In return, its suppliers frequently become trusted partners in uncovering new business opportunities. When a company is constantly changing and its revenues and profits are growing you’ll generally find a more engaged group of vendors and suppliers who are interested in truly being good business partners "
30 " If a business isn’t growing between 5 and 10 percent annually, the good, highly talented people won’t get the responsibility and the financial rewards they want, and they’ll leave. "
31 " Your job as you know it and your business as it is currently run will eventually change. The only chance any of us have for prosperity is to constantly reimagine, rethink, and reinvent everything we do and how we do it in order to remain relevant. We must all become reinventors, and we’d better do it quickly. "
32 " Before you can implement radical change, you have to let go of the things that will destine your attempts for failure, and make letting go a vital part of your culture "
33 " Innovator Charles Kettering, the longtime head of research at General Motors and a prolific inventor, had warned his industry colleagues about getting caught in this trap. “An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn’t take his education too seriously,” he said. In other words, inventors are engineers who can let go of their expertness and achieve what Apple’s late CEO, Steve Jobs, called the “lightness of being a beginner again. "
34 " THE REINVENTION KILLERS Yesterday’s Breadwinners Every product or service has a natural life cycle that begins with an introduction, followed by growth, maturity, and inevitably a decline as it becomes yesterday’s breadwinner. There are no exceptions "
35 " I undertook this project with the vague notion that reinvention was about moving a business from point A to point B. But that’s not what I found. We discovered that in the process of moving from A to B these businesses developed new skill sets and values that allowed them to quickly progress to C, D, E, and beyond. They all became serial reinventors and embraced constant radical change. "
36 " not having enough money brought everyone together at Southwest. Twelve different job functions, from flight crews to baggage handlers, all put aside status concerns, job descriptions, and work rules to become a team with a big objective: the ten-minute turn. "
37 " Companies committed to growth make staying ahead of their customers’ wants and needs a hallmark of their culture and accomplish that goal through constant radical change and reinvention. "
38 " Great companies [inevitably] develop a rowboat mentality,” says Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony. They are “always looking behind to past successes” with awe and admiration as they row into the future. "
39 " As testament to the passion for change and reinvention that Apple embraces, more than half of the company’s revenue comes from products that didn’t exist four years ago. "
40 " The more simple you can make it allows your people to get really focused. "