Bold: How to go Big!
I like to read. I don't always read leadership books too, even thought I do enjoy the topic. I recently read a book title Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler.
The book is mostly for entrepreneurs looking to innovate the world and business. However, there are some very interesting principles in this book that I believe deserve to be highlighted and commented on. In fact, my big take away is that leaders must understand the world in which they lead. Foreseeing the world that is to come, with all the available technology at anyones fingertips, leadership will change. The very fact that I am writing a blog post that will email to over 250 people in extraordinary. 20 years ago only person that would hear what I had to say would be someone that couldn't walk away fast enough.
Here are some of the take aways from the book. I even added a video from YouTube that gives further evidence to the authors findings:
Think “Exponentially”
“The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”
In millennia past, only “kings, pharaohs and emperors” had the resources to attack society’s largest problems. With the Industrial Revolution, power diffused to the new captains of industry who had the financial and intellectual capacity to expand society’s infrastructure and modernize production. Today, anyone with a great idea, passion and commitment “has access to the technology, minds and capital” needed to turn that idea into a reality.
“Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks. It means not being afraid to fail. Because you will fail. The road to bold is paved with failure.”
Exponential Opportunities
Artificial intelligence (A.I.), which dates back to 1956, will massively disrupt the marketplace. Many industries face imminent disruption. Today’s AI systems recognize objects, read and write better than humans, and verge on matching people’s ability to integrate knowledge. Google director of engineering, futurist Ray Kurzweil, believes that by 2029, AI will outperform people at everything. You can use personal AI to measure everything you do, offer data to improve your health, and even help you recall the name of that almost-familiar guy from last night’s party.
Industrial robots transformed manufacturing. Personal robots with AI capacity may eliminate 45% of US jobs by 2035 – particularly doing unpleasant, manual labor but even displacing surgeons.
“Incentive Competitions”
Contests that give big prizes for innovation focus brainpower worldwide on your challenge. Incentive competitions helped find a better way to clean up oil spills and improved Netflix’s movie-recommendation system. In 1714, the British Parliament offered a £20,000 prize for the person who first measured longitude at sea. Today, sites like HeroX and 99 Designs walk you through creating incentive competitions and provide a platform to launch and manage them. You only pay the winner, but you receive mountains of world-class ideas from dozens or hundreds of competitors. From the competitor’s perspective, “incentive prizes provide exponential entrepreneurs with...an innovation acceleration engine unrivaled in history.”
Open your competition to anyone in the world so you tap into the largest potential base. Keep the competition running long enough to match the scope of your challenge; the bigger the challenge and the prize, the longer the time frame, from as little as a few months to almost a decade. Craft your rules to encourage creativity, but provide an incentive for results you really want. Make sure your teams can sell the work commercially after the competition. That will drive maximum interest. Focus on incremental steps and goals. Examine what worked consistently for you in the past, then turn those factors into the rules you’ll need to maximize your results.