Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success is a book about the power of lateral thinking- solving problems through an indirect or creative approach. “Smartcuts” means sustainable success achieved through smart work. This is different than “shortcuts”, which are rapid, but short term gains. Ultimately the book outlines 9 key ideas, that lead up to the concept of “10x thinking”.
#1 Hacking the Ladder
Find sideways paths, like the warp pipes in Super Mario that allows someone to beat the game in seconds, not hours.
#2 Train with Masters
Find mentors, and/or study the greats. Shoe designer Dwayne Edwards stole discarded shoes so he could study and draw the designs. This helped him develop the ability to notice tiny design details in shoes.
#3 Rapid Feedback
Rapid feedback accelerates learning. This has been critical to a lot of companies that have a website as their main product. In this book, the example of Upworthy illustrates the point. Turn work into rapid scientific experiments, and depersonalized feedback.
Tools and technology that people can buid off of. a platform “amplifies the effort and teaches skills in the process of using it.“ Key example: development of Ruby on Rails as a programming language.
Platforms are how Twitter could build Twitter in mere days while running a separate company. And Platforms are why Finland made all its teachers get a Master’s degrees and its students learn with hands-on tools that made learning better.
#5 Catching waves
The world’s best surfers arrive at the beach hours before a competition and stare at the ocean. This is a valuable metaphor for a lot of things in business and life.
“Intuition is the result of nonconscious pattern recognition,” ….. However, research shows, that we can also see patterns just as well by deliberately looking for them. Deliberate pattern spotting can compensate for experience. “but often people don’t even try it”
Budgeted Experimentation helps business avoid being disrupted, by helping them harness waves on which younger competitors might otherwise used to ride past them. Its helped companies like Google, 3M, Flickr, Conde Nast, and NPR remain innovative even as peer companies plateaued. In contrast, companies that are too focused on defending their current business practice and to fearful to experiment often get overtaken.
Key example of what to avoid: Kodak
Key example: Che Guevera taking control of the radio, using it as a way of promoting Castro’s revolution to a much wider audience than otherwise possible.
Build up potential energy, and amplify unexpected opportunities.
The key feature of disruptively innovative products is cost savings(either time or money). But the key ingredient behind the scenes of every disruptive product is simplification.
Examples, email, USB Drives, Cars.(Henry Ford kept complexity under the hood).
Key example: Sherlock Holmes. He focused on what he needed to know, knowing how to figure out what he didn’t know, and forgetting about everything else.
#9 10x thinking
This quote from Astro Teller is key:
Its often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better…. In order to get really big improvements you usually have to start over in one or more ways. You have to break some of the basic assumptions and, of course, you can’t know ahead of time. Its by definition counter intuitive.
This means getting to first principles. 10x thinking forces you to come up with smartcuts.
10x thinking is probably now essential for survival in the modern economy.
Most innovation inside industries and companies today focuses on making faster horses, not automobiles.
This is why the innovator’s dilemma destroy’s so many companies. What replaces them is something better. Creative destruction is a beautiful thing.