Quotes from Jason Jennings

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The more simple you can make it allows your people to get really focused.

We are working hard to avoid living in our past," he says. Stringer recognized that the real culprit standing in the way of progress at Sony was a tradition-bound mentality and began systematically letting go of the traditions and people that had hamstrung the company.

Hackett found that leaders at "above average" companies are surprisingly different in this critical measure. They identify an average of just twenty-one priorities instead of 372. Editing the list isn't easy, but the payoff is huge. Time and money get tightly focused on the crucial activities that drive the firm's competitive advantage, and everyone has a clearer idea what to do and no problem deciding who's accountable.

Given how inexpensive technology and analytics have become, it's inexcusable for any business not to know every customer

The ability of an organization to embrace radical change and reinvention is determined by the ego of the person in charge; substantive change is never initiated from the mid level or bottom ranks of an organization.

A.T. Kearney research shows that the best performing companies had five hundred fewer managers per billion dollars in sales than poorer performing organizations.

Be relentless about simplifying everything without exception.

Culture is defined as the shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices of an organization; every group of people has a culture.

When a leader fails to provide the proper culture, one will still exist; it can best be described as one of every man for himself, each acting in his own best interests and to heck with the interests of the company.

We have a history of wanting our leaders to be taller than average. That's probably because in ancient times everyone thought that tall leaders could see farther.

We have a history of wanting our leaders to be taller than average. That's probably because in ancient times everyone thought that tall leaders could see farther. We still want leaders to see far enough to tell us which way to go. But many CEOs fail.

Here's the list of opposing ideas that successful reinventors say you need in your head: Hold on tight and freely let go. Be hard-nosed and soft hearted. Focus on a clear destination and search for new horizons. Take big risks and make small bets. Be frugal and still splurge. Think big and act small. Be highly creative and obsessively down-to-earth. Thoughtfully work your plan and improvise without thinking too much.

Companies that do the best job of embracing constant change, growth, and reinvention make it look easy, because they've systematized and scaled all the core business practices. Systematizing means determining the best way to do something (step-by-step), making certain everyone does his or her part the same way (without significant variation), and then using the system as a baseline for continual improvement.

McQueen says he was heavily influenced by the book The Experience Economy, by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, whose thesis is that we've moved from being an agrarian economy to one based on industry and now to an experience economy, in which our lives are filled with memorable, branded experiences.

But the billion-dollar cut was anything but self-defeating tinkering. Many of the research scientists were energized. They cleaned out the cobwebs and refocused their thinking, many spending quality time with customers. The result was scores of innovations that matter. Frugal was a catalyst, not a catastrophe.

Millner is just as excited about the culture of continuous improvement that is at the core of Cabela's. "Adaptation is critical. You've got to adapt. No matter how successful you are, the minute you can't do what you've done, you've got to let it go. If you don't continuously improve, you die.

All entrepreneurs get strapped for cash. Private equity and other sources of funding will buy into the company. But many don't buy into the dream and end up driving the entrepreneur away. "We don't want to let that entrepreneurial dream disappear when they become part of our twenty-billion-dollar business," Long says.

thousand CEOs, business owners, and highly successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?