Nathan Furr

A science-backed guide for navigating and thriving through uncertainty—based on interviews and insights from world-renowned innovators, entrepreneurs, artists, and creatives. Whether you're starting or running a business, searching for new ideas, or trying to advance in your career, you're likely to grapple with the unknown and unpredictable—every day. Though these moments can be difficult and uncomfortable, they also offer opportunities for personal growth, innovation, and creativity. In The Upside of Uncertainty, INSEAD professor Nathan Furr and entrepreneur Susannah Harmon Furr provide a panoramic guide to transforming uncertainty into a force for good. Drawing from hundreds of interviews, along with pioneering research in psychology, innovation, and behavioral economics, Nathan and Susannah provide over thirty tools for adopting a more positive view of what's happening, developing a vision for what to do next, and opening ourselves up to more and more possibilities. Timely and tactical, The Upside of Uncertainty provides the tools and strategies you need to thrive through life's never-ending plot twists.

A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown

The Upside of Uncertainty

A science-backed guide for navigating and thriving through uncertainty—based on interviews and insights from world-renowned leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, artists, and creatives. Whether you're searching for courage to start a new project, change careers, launch a business, develop an idea, or reinvent yourself after a disappointment or life change, you will face uncertainty—that ambiguous and uncomfortable state that often makes us feel confused, anxious, and afraid to act. Though these moments are difficult, they offer opportunities for personal growth, innovation, and creativity. In The Upside of Uncertainty, INSEAD professor Nathan Furr and entrepreneur Susannah Harmon Furr provide a sweeping guide to embracing uncertainty and transforming it into a force for good. Drawing from hundreds of interviews, along with pioneering research in psychology, innovation, and behavioral economics, Nathan and Susannah provide dozens of tools—including mental models, techniques, and reflections—for seeing the upside of uncertainty, developing a vision for what to do next, and opening ourselves up to new possibilities. In our fast-paced, ever-changing world, uncertainty is on the rise. We face it every day. But few of us have been taught the techniques to navigate it well. The Upside of Uncertainty provides the inspiration, tools, and strategies you need to thrive through the inevitable plot twists in your life and career.

Thomas Zoega Ramsoy

Kyle Nel

How companies transform -- Step 1. Envisioning the future: using science fiction and strategic narrative to create a compelling story -- Step 2. Breaking bottlenecks: using decision maps and archetypes -- Step 3. Navigating the unknown: using applied neuroscience and KPIs of the future -- Leading the self-transforming organization -- Epilogue: The behavioral innovation manifesto: new approaches for a world of uncertainty

How to Take Charge of Your Company's Future

Leading Transformation

New Tools to Overcome the Human Barriers to Change Leaders know that their job is to transform their organizations to keep pace with technology and an ever-changing business environment. They also know that they are bound to fail in doing so. But this discouraging prospect is not because they won't be able to solve a technological or strategic problem. Leaders will fail because of intractable human responses associated with change--responses such as fear, ingrained habits, politics, incrementalism, and lack of imagination. These stumbling blocks always arise when we humans are faced with change, but what if we had a way to transcend them? This book reveals a radical new method for doing just that. Written by the executive who designed and implemented it, the neuroscientist who helped make it work, and the academic who explains why it works and how to do it, Leading Transformation introduces an innovative yet proven process for creating breakthrough change. Divided into three steps--envisioning the possible, breaking down resistance, and prototyping the future--this process uses cutting-edge tools such as science fiction, cartoons, rap music, artifact trails, and neuroprototypes to overcome people's inability to imagine or react to what doesn't yet exist, override powerful habits and routines that prevent them from changing, and create compelling narratives about the organization's future and how to get there. Showing how these tools have been used successfully by companies such as Lowe's, Walmart, Pepsi, IKEA, Google, Microsoft, and others, the process revealed in this book gives leaders the means to transcend the human barriers that block change and lead their organizations confidently into the future.

Jeff Dyer

Curtis Lefrandt

We've all seen leaders who excel at winning resources and support for their ideas. It turns out that this quality is so valuable, and measurably more important for innovation than just being creative, that it has a name: "innovation capital." Contrary to popular belief, effective leaders of innovation--folks like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk--are successful not only because of the quality of their ideas but because they have the reputation and networks to successfully commercialize creative ideas. Nikola Tesla was arguably a more brilliant inventor than Thomas Edison, but Edison was able to realize tremendous commercial success while Tesla died penniless. Innovation Capital reveals the critical ingredient that separates the people who can marshal the resources necessary to turn their ideas into reality from those who can't, and shows you how to acquire, amplify, and use it to succeed as an innovative leader. Authors Jeff Dyer, Nathan Furr, and Curtis Lefrandt have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator's DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator's Method). Now, they share what they have learned from a multipronged research program designed to understand how people compete for, and obtain, resources to launch innovative new ideas--even, in some cases, before they've earned a track record of innovation. The authors explore questions like: What makes someone a good innovation leader? How do you win resources in a competitive market? How can you build a personal reputation for innovation? What techniques can you use to amplify your innovation capital? How can you get attention for your ideas and projects and persuade audiences to support them? How do you use (or lose) your capital once you have it? Featuring interviews with the superstars of innovation--individuals such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Elon Musk (Tesla), Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo) and Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn), who made the Top 25 on Forbes first list of the world's most innovative leaders ranked by their innovation capital--this book will help you and your ideas compete for attention, resources, and support--and win.

How to Compete--and Win--like the World's Most Innovative Leaders

Innovation Capital

Have you ever come up with an idea for a new product or service but didn’t take any action because you thought it would be too risky? Or at work, have you had what you thought could be a big idea for your company—perhaps changing the way you develop or distribute a product, provide customer service, or hire and train your employees? If you have, but you haven’t known how to take the next step, you need to understand what the authors call the innovator’s method—a set of tools emerging from lean start-up, design thinking, and agile software development that are revolutionizing how new ideas are created, refined, and brought to market. To date these tools have helped entrepreneurs, designers, and software developers manage uncertainty—through cheap and rapid experiments that systematically lower failure rates and risk. But many managers and leaders struggle to apply these powerful tools within their organizations, as they often run counter to traditional managerial thinking and practice. Authors Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer wrote this book to address that very problem. Following the breakout success of The Innovator’s DNA—which Dyer wrote with Hal Gregersen and bestselling author Clay Christensen to provide a framework for generating ideas—this book shows how to make those ideas actually happen, to commercialize them for success. Based on their research inside corporations and successful start-ups, Furr and Dyer developed the innovator’s method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining, and bringing ideas to market. They show when and how to apply the tools of their method, how to adapt them to your business, and how to answer commonly asked questions about the method itself, including: How do we know if this idea is worth pursuing? Have we found the right solution? What is the best business model for this new offering? This book focuses on the “how”—how to test, how to validate, and how to commercialize ideas with the lean, design, and agile techniques successful start-ups use. Whether you’re launching a start-up, leading an established one, or simply working to get a new product off the ground in an existing company, this book is for you.

Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization

The Innovator's Method

Learn from the Best Great leaders of innovation know that creativity is not enough. They succeed not only on the basis of their ideas, but because they have the vision, reputation, and networks to win the backing needed to commercialize them. It turns out that this quality--called "innovation capital"--is measurably more important for innovation than just being creative. The authors have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator's DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator's Method). Now they share what they've learned from a multipronged research program designed to determine how people compete for, and obtain, resources to launch new ideas: How you can build a personal reputation for innovation What techniques you can use to amplify your innovation capital How you can garner attention for your ideas and projects and persuade audiences to support them What it means to provide visionary leadership and how you can achieve it Featuring interviews with the superstars of innovation--individuals like Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Elon Musk (Tesla), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo), and Shantanu Narayen (Adobe)--this book will help you position yourself and your ideas to compete for attention and resources so that you can launch innovations with impact.

Nathan Furr

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