p.3 The purpose of this book is to show how the discipline of strategic intuition works.
p.9 Strategic intuition puts leaps of human achievement within the grasp of all human beings - of people
like you.
p.18 Step 1 of the scientific method is: look in the laboratories of other scientists. Step 2 is your own
experiments, or "experience" as [Roger] Bacon [the first scholar in Europe to write about the scientific method, circa 1267]
calls it. Step 3 is your reason.
p.19 Observation and reason are certainly important to science, but the achievements of other scientists
come first. Scientists borrow from other scientists as the first step in their own discoveries, over and over, down
through the ages.
p.19 So scientific advance does not come about by a leap of thought to a new theory, but rather
from combining specific achievements that lead to a theory, which explains them. It's an act of combination, not
imagination. Specifically, it's the selective recombination of previous elements into a new whole. Pieces of the past come
together to make a new future.
p.46 [research psychologist Gary] Klein notes this pattern among experts in general. They
do not set a goal first and then plan activities to reach the goal. Instead, the actions and goal come together:
What triggers active problem-solving is the ability to recognize when a
goal is reachable... There must be an experiential ability to judge the solvability of problems prior to
working on them. Experience lets us recognize the existence of opportunities. When the opportunity is recognized,
the problem solver working out its implications is looking for a way to make good use of it, trying to shape it into a reasonable
goal.
p.60 We now understand what von Clausewitz tells us about coup d'oeil [ a French phrase meaning 'a
glance of the eye']. He explains in four steps how coup d'oeil happens: examples from history, presence of mind, the flash
of insight itself, and resolution.
p.63 [Napoleon quote] "The art of war consists, with a numerically inferior army, in always having
larger forces than the enemy at the point which must be attacked or defended... it is an intuitive way of acting
which properly constitutes the genius of war."
Napoleon wanted superior strength wherever he fought the battle. That was his decisive
point. He did not set out an objective point and march his army to it.
p.99 Page and Brin [founders of Google] did not invent AltaVista, academic citations, data mining,
and Overture [search engine company which presented advertisements in simple lists rather than in banner ads], but they were
the ones who combined them, over four years in a series of flashes of insight.
p.100 New ideas come from old ones. What is needed is not permanent revolution
but permanent evolution, where you constantly search for a better combination.
p.102 [Steve Jobs quoted] Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people
how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious
to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.
p.102 The lesson for strategic innovation is simply to take what you find: you don't go
looking for a revolutionary idea and you're not disappointed when what you find is less than revolutionary.
p.121-122 You cannot develop a perfect strategic plan... The plan serves as an orienting vision which helps
people and programs keep moving toward agreed-upon goals.
p.152 Innovation comes through creative combination, by bringing past elements together
in a new and useful way.
