Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business

Branching Out

We all like to think we'd jump at a brilliant idea—like say, producing a show like Glee or creating an awesome longboard from leftover materials in our shop—if it smacked us in the head, but few of us or our companies ever do. This, more than anything, is why people like to say that ideas are cheap. In truth, great ideas are priceless, but we only know which ideas are great with the benefit of hindsight, after the daring path has successfully been taken—and we're rarely privy to the other ideas and choices that might have been tried and discarded along the way. It's hard if not impossible to know which directions will bear fruit, so without an organizational mindset to try out divergent paths, uncertainty and inertia conspire to ...