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    Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries
    Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries
    Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries
    Audiobook5 hours

    Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

    Written by Peter Sims

    Narrated by John Allen Nelson

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, prizewinning architect Frank Gehry, the story developers at Pixar films, and the Army Chief of Strategic Plans all have in common? Bestselling author Peter Sims found that all of them have achieved breakthrough results by methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas. Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan a whole project out in advance, trying to foresee the final outcome, they make a series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning from lots of little failures and from small but highly significant wins that allow them to happen upon unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.

    Based on deep and extensive research, including more than two hundred interviews with leading innovators, Sims discovered that productive, creative thinkers and doers-from Ludwig van Beethoven to Thomas Edison and Amazon's Jeff Bezos-practice a key set of simple but ingenious experimental methods, such as failing quickly to learn fast, tapping into the genius of play, and engaging in highly immersed observation, that free their minds, opening them up to making unexpected connections and perceiving invaluable insights. These methods also unshackle them from the constraints of overly analytical thinking and linear problem solving that our education places so much emphasis on, as well as from the fear of failure, all of which thwart so many of us in trying to be more innovative.

    Reporting on a fascinating range of research, from the psychology of creative blocks to the influential Silicon Valley-based field of design thinking, Sims offers engaging and wonderfully illuminating accounts of breakthrough innovators at work, including how Hewlett-Packard stumbled onto the breakaway success of the first hand-held calculator; the remarkable storyboarding process at Pixar films that has been the key to their unbroken streak of box office successes; the playful discovery process by which Frank Gehry arrived at his critically acclaimed design for Disney Hall; the "aha" revelation that led Amazon to pursue its wildly successful affiliates program; and the U.S. Army's ingenious approach to counterinsurgency operations that led to the dramatic turnaround in Iraq.

    Fast paced and as entertaining as it is illuminating, Little Bets offers a whole new way of thinking about how to break away from the narrow strictures of the methods of analyzing and problem solving we were all taught in school and unleash our untapped creative powers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 9, 2011
    ISBN9781452673936
    Author

    Peter Sims

    Peter Sims is a bestselling author and the founder and chairman of BLK SHP (Black Sheep), Inc., a place and platform for making small bets and building new ventures. He is also an advisor at Google[x], The Moonshot Factory, Alphabet’s semi-secret innovation laboratory. After working as an investor in venture capital with Summit Partners in London, Sims became an accidental author, as the coauthor of True North, the bestseller that has been selected as one of the top twenty-five leadership books of all-time. After that, he stumbled into Stanford’s Institute of Design and learned product design and design thinking, an experience that helped Peter view himself as a creative for the first time, so he dedicated himself to writing his second book, Little Bets, for all those with untapped creativity. A top resource for innovators, it was selected as one of the six best advice books for entrepreneurs by The Wall Street Journal. Previously, he cofounded FUSE corps and was part of the initial team of collaborators that started Giving Tuesday, the global philanthropic movement that raised roughly $10 billion in over 100 countries for social good causes. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College and Stanford Business School. In all that he does, Peter feels most at home as a creative entrepreneur and innovator, contributing to making the world a bit more human.

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    Reviews for Little Bets

    4/5

    54 ratings5 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Brilliantly insightful, very interesting, and well written. Highly recommended indeed.
    • 5/5
      As a perfectionist, this book has great insight on how to just get moving.
    • 4/5
      Life can be an experiment, and we can make a lot of little bets along the way. It's probably a better strategy than making just a few big bets.
    • 4/5
      Good information, though the writing didn't really captivate me. It does make me want to read more about Pixar and HP. The Frank Gehry section really could have used some photos.

      Feel free to skip stuff, for example, I already knew the growth mindset work from Prof. Carol Dweck. And I didn't find the fMRI studies of music improvisation very convincing.

      Read it for the "big bet" failures at HP and how they learned from that, plus the Pixar stuff, "We never finish a film, we just release it." This all fits into my understanding of product releases as conversations with the customer. With every release, from alpha to version 13, you need to know what question you are asking and what you want to learn.
    • 4/5
      In a roundabout way, a book like Little Bets is why I read non-fiction. I certainly didn't love it. The author cherry picks from a group of modern day all-star companies and CEOs for nearly 100% of his examples (I mean, I love Pixar too but aren't there other, less popular examples?) and the prose is a little too fake-sounding at times, but there's some good advice here if you take the time to draw it out.