The Creator's Code
The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Based on in-depth interviews with more than 200 leading entrepreneurs, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business identifies the six essential disciplines needed to transform your ideas into real-world successes.
Each of us has the capacity to spot opportunities, invent products, and build businesses—even $100 million businesses.
How do some people turn ideas into enterprises that endure? Why do some people succeed when so many others fail? The Creator’s Code unlocks the six essential skills that turn small notions into big companies. This landmark book is based on 200 interviews with today’s leading entrepreneurs including the founders of LinkedIn, Chipotle, eBay, Under Armour, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, Spanx, Airbnb, PayPal, Jetblue, Gilt Groupe, Theranos, and Dropbox.
Over the course of five years, Amy Wilkinson conducted rigorous interviews and analyzed research across many different fields. From the creators of the companies ranging from Yelp to Chobani to Zipcar, she found that entrepreneurial success works in much the same way. Creators are not born with an innate ability to conceive and build $100 million enterprises. They work at it. They all share fundamental skills that can be learned, practiced, and passed on.
The Creator’s Code reveals six skills that make creators of all kinds of endeavors breakthrough. These skills aren’t rare gifts or slim chance talents. Entrepreneurship, Wilkinson demonstrates, is accessible to everyone.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this ambitious but not totally satisfying debut, Wilkinson, senior fellow at Harvard's Center for Public Leadership, lists the necessary skills for innovators and entrepreneurs. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with leading entrepreneurs, she identifies six specific techniques: "find the gap," "drive for daylight," "fly the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loop," "fail wisely," "network minds," and "gift small goods." She also draws a portrait of creators as tirelessly working, networking, and sharing. The entrepreneurs depicted here ultimately triumph, but they also fail, at least at first, and in small, calculated ways. Their trick: staying optimistic while rigorously analyzing each mistake. "I've not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work," Thomas Edison is reported to have said. Elsewhere, Wilkinson quotes an unflappable Elon Musk on starting Telsa Motors: "It feels like chewing glass and staring into the abyss." Wilkinson clarifies that the "skills aren't a monopoly of a special category of person," but are attainable for people willing to commit themselves. Still, despite the book's impressive array of case studies, it may leave readers feeling that, while the average innovator undoubtedly possesses all the skills enumerated here, there's a lot more to world-changing innovation.
