January 6: Innovation is messy
"But when you’re inventing, you have to let the conversation take you."
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Source: Harvard Business School (15:20)
Published: September 2020
Innovation is messy
“During my time as Jeff [Bezos’s] technical advisor… I learned that innovation is messy. A lot of times people think you can schedule innovation; for example, a 60-minute brainstorming meeting. But my experience is that it isn’t that clean; you end up at a lot of dead ends.
I was taught that you start meetings exactly on time and finish on schedule—and that is oftentimes the most efficient way to run a business.
But when you’re inventing, you have to let the conversation take you. Sometimes we’d go an extra 90 minutes because we… we were inventing something and had the right people in the room.”
- Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services
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Did you appreciate the fact today?
I love the framing of having the right people in the room as something that you realize once the conversation has started, rather than something you can predict or schedule.