How do you remain innovative and competitive in an increasingly complex world? Susan Wojcicki, Google's employee #16, gives her 8 hints towards staying innovative. I particularly liked this quote: "What's different is that, even as we dream up what's next, we face the classic innovator's dilemma: should we invest in brand new products, or should we improve existing ones? We believe in doing both, and learning while we do it." (emphasis mine)
Here are Susan's eight pillars:
- Have a mission that matters
- Think big but start small
- Strive for continual innovation, not instant perfection
- Look for ideas everywhere
- Share everything
- Spark with imagination, fuel with data
- Be a platform
- Never fail to fail
That last one, Never fail to fail, is often a hard lesson for folks to learn. It's okay to fail - just be sure to learn a lesson when things don't work out the way you expected to. And of course, when you make an error, it helps to step back and plan your mistake strategy before trying to fix things.
