ONATHAN LØW created The GuruBook to change, refine, and enhance your thinking. He has curated ideas from 45 internationally–known doers and thinkers on the topics of entrepreneurship, innovation, and authentic leadership.

You’ll find great insights here from the likes of Sonia Arrison, Edgar H. Schein, Henry Mintzberg, Tom Peters, Pascal Finette, Andreas Ehn, Murray Newlands, Brian Chesky, Hampus Jakobsson, Craig Newmark, Alf Rehn, Paul Nunes, Nathan Furr, Mette Lykke and others. But here are several that I found interesting my first time through the book:

Steve Blank: Startups Are Not a Smaller Version of a Large Company

We know that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. The corollary for an enterprise is as follows:

A company is a permanent organization designed to execute a repeatable and scalable business model.

Once you understand that existing companies are designed to execute, then you can see why they have a hard time with continuous and disruptive innovation.

Danny Lange: Becoming Truly Data Driven

We’re seeing a development where you will be in trouble 24-36 months from now if you don’t start taking machine learning seriously. It will happen especially in industries such as transportation, shipping, finance, and retail, but all kinds of companies and leaders should look into this much deeper.

Of course, the big companies have an advantage due to the amount of data they often how. The startups lack this, and data is increasingly becoming king.

For example, you may be able to build a better app with a better backend than Uber, and pay a crew of drivers more money, but if you don’t have the data to deliver a consistently better pickup experience, all of that might not matter at all.

Christian Ørsted: Authentic Leadership is Narcissism

The leader’s most important task is not being authentic but focusing on serving. The leader’s own idea of the world or of him- or herself is completely without interest with regard to how he or she can serve the organization and the world in the best way possible.

That’s why there’s a risk that the whole concept of authentic leadership can easily give leaders an excuse for being narcissistic and focusing on themselves and their own values as leaders rather than how they create the best possible culture for their employees.

Daniel Burrus: How to Anticipate the Future

There are an amazing number of things we can accurately predict when we learn how to distinguish between what I call hard trends, trends that will happen, and soft trends, trends that might happen. Think of it as a two-sided coin. Agility is on one side, allowing you to react fast to unforeseen change, and the other side is anticipatory, allowing you to see what is coming and take action before the change occurs.

Agility is basically reacting quickly to change. Therefore, it’s important to understand that agile innovation is reactive innovation. Agile innovation will keep you reacting to disruptive innovation created by others.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:34 PM
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