The Creator's Code

"The skills that make them successful can be learned, practiced and passed on."

— Amy Wilkinson

Wilkinson is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she earned her bachelor's, master's and MBA. Before that she was an M&A banker at J.P. Morgan, a strategy consultant at McKinsey and a White House Fellow advising the U.S. Trade Representative. For this book she spent five years interviewing two hundred founders of companies with more than a hundred million dollars in annual revenue, or of social enterprises serving more than a hundred thousand people, among them LinkedIn, Chipotle, Under Armour, Tesla, SpaceX, Spanx, Airbnb and PayPal. Her conclusion is that what unites them is not origin, age, sector or character, but a code of six skills.

On how they find the opportunity, the first skill is finding the gap, and Wilkinson describes three ways of doing it:

• Sunbirds. They take a solution that works in one place to another where it doesn't exist, like Howard Schultz when he brought the Italian espresso-bar model to the United States and adapted it to the American customer.
• Architects. They spot a problem no one is solving and build from scratch, like Sara Blakely when she made the first Spanx prototypes because the hosiery that existed was uncomfortable to her.
• Integrators. They combine opposing concepts into something new, like the founders of Gilt Groupe when they brought together luxury goods and e-commerce.

Knowing which of the three you are tells you where to look.

On how they move forward, the lessons are two:

• Drive for daylight. Just as a race-car driver looks at the road ahead, creators focus on the future and not on their competitors' position. They ask what the customer will want in a few years, not what the rival is doing today.
• Fly the OODA loop. The concept comes from John Boyd, a fighter pilot: observe, orient, decide and act, over and over, faster than the others. Creators update their assumptions continuously and accept deciding with incomplete information.

On error, the fourth skill is failing wisely. A series of small failures is what prevents the catastrophic mistake. Creators make small bets to test ideas, set in advance what Wilkinson calls a failure ratio, that is, how many attempts they expect not to work, and develop the resilience to turn every stumble into learning.

On how they work with others, the last two:

• Network minds. For complex problems, they bring together people different from themselves, inside and outside the company, and harness that diversity of thought to build on each other's ideas.
• Gift small goods. They share information, help finish a task or open a door for a colleague. It seems a minor gesture, but it's how creators strengthen their relationships, and in an increasingly connected world generosity makes them more productive. The connection to Adam Grant's Give and Take is direct.

The concept to master is the OODA loop. In a new market the advantage lies not in the quality of a single decision, but in the speed of the sequence of decisions. The winner is whoever completes more cycles of observing, deciding and correcting, not whoever makes the best plan. It's the same logic as build, measure, learn from The Lean Startup, seen from a pilot's cockpit.

How to start this process? Write in one line which of the three ways of finding the gap describes your idea. If you're an architect, ask whether there's a proven solution in another country or industry you could bring over. Then pick a decision you've been mulling over for weeks, make it today with the information you have and put on your calendar the date you'll review it.

As a founder it will help you turn the notion of "being cut out to be an entrepreneur" into six behaviors you can observe and train in yourself. It will also help you evaluate cofounders, executives and founders you want to partner with.