Think about what’s in front of you, not behind. It’s proven to keep you motivated, says Stanford lecturer and author Amy Wilkinson in a talk at this year’s IBM World of Watson.
Who Is Amy Wilkinson?
Wilkinson is a Lecturer in Management at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Before teaching, she held leadership roles at McKinsey & Company and J.P. Morgan, founded an export company, and worked in government as a White House Fellow and a Senior Advisor to the United States Trade Representative.
According to her World Economic Forum profile, the research behind her book was done while she was a senior fellow at Harvard. She’s also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a 2015 Eisenhower Fellow.
That mix of business, startup and policy experience shaped her research. Publishers Weekly’s review notes the book draws on five years of interviews and analysis. Rather than studying one company in depth, she set out to find the habits that successful founders across very different industries had in common.
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Wilkinson’s book, The Creator’s Code, is based on more than 200 in-depth interviews with leading founders including those from PayPal, AirBnB and Tesla.
From her interviews she uncovered six essential skills every exceptional entrepreneur lives by:
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The Six Skills, Explained
The book names the six skills in short, memorable phrases. Stanford’s summary of the book describes them roughly like this:
Find the gap. Exceptional entrepreneurs spot opportunities that other people miss.
Drive for daylight. This is the skill behind Wilkinson’s advice to look ahead rather than behind. It’s about managing speed by keeping your eyes on the horizon, the way a driver focuses on the road ahead instead of the rear-view mirror. A Salesforce write-up of the book adds that it means cutting out distractions, including keeping a “don’t do” list.
Fly the OODA loop. OODA stands for observe, orient, decide and act, a decision cycle borrowed from military strategy. Founders who run through it quickly and repeatedly can adjust to change faster than competitors who plan once and stick to it.
Fail wisely. Failure is part of the process, but the best founders keep it small and deliberate. Wilkinson describes placing small bets and even setting a “failure ratio,” so that a single mistake never sinks the whole company.
Network minds. Good founders bring together people who think differently and use those differences to sharpen each other’s ideas.
Gift small goods. Small acts of generosity toward others turn out to make founders and their teams more productive, not less.
Wilkinson’s central argument is that these are skills, not personality traits. As she presents them, they can be learned and practised, and they reinforce each other rather than working alone.
The PayPal Mafia as Proof
If you want an example of how powerful these practices can be, you need only look at PayPal. The company spawned 13 men — known as the PayPal Mafia — who have gone on to found some of the most popular tech companies, including YouTube, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Kiva and Square.
It’s a good illustration of how these skills travel with people. The habits a team builds at one startup don’t stay there; they go with each person to whatever they found next.
IBM World of Watson is in Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, until Thursday, 27 October. Follow TechPortfolio on Twitter for up-to-the-minute coverage.
What Happened Next
World of Watson didn’t stay a separate event for long. In March 2018, IBM rolled it into Think, a single flagship conference in Las Vegas that combined five of its older events, including World of Watson and InterConnect.
Wilkinson took her own advice about founding. Stanford lists her as the founder and CEO of Ingenuity since 2017, alongside her teaching at the business school.
What It Means for Founders
The most practical thing about the six skills is that none of them depends on a big budget. Any founder can keep a “don’t do” list, run a quick observe-orient-decide-act check after each customer conversation, set a limit on how much a single experiment is allowed to cost, and make one useful introduction a week.
None of that guarantees a PayPal-sized outcome. But Wilkinson’s research suggests the founders who got there were doing these things consistently, long before anyone called them exceptional.
To learn about what Watson can do for your business, read more here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Amy Wilkinson?
Amy Wilkinson is a Lecturer in Management at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and the author of The Creator's Code. She previously worked at McKinsey & Company and J.P. Morgan, and served as a White House Fellow.
What is The Creator's Code based on?
The Creator's Code is based on more than 200 in-depth interviews with leading founders, including those from PayPal, Airbnb and Tesla.
What are the six skills in The Creator's Code?
The six skills are find the gap, drive for daylight, fly the OODA loop, fail wisely, network minds, and gift small goods. Amy Wilkinson argues they can be learned and practised rather than being innate traits.
What does "drive for daylight" mean?
Drive for daylight means managing speed by keeping your focus on the horizon rather than looking behind. It's the skill behind Amy Wilkinson's advice to think about what's in front of you, which she says keeps you motivated.
What happened to IBM World of Watson?
In March 2018, IBM rolled World of Watson into Think, a single flagship conference in Las Vegas that combined several of its older events, including InterConnect.