SIMPLY BRILLIANT

The cofounder of Fast Company shows that opportunities for extraordinary innovation may be closer than you think. A new era of business and leadership cries out for new stories of success, and new strategies for bringing them to life. Today, the way to win big, argues bestselling author William C. Taylor, is to relentlessly rethink the everyday.

A new era of business and leadership cries out for new stories of success, and new strategies for bringing them to life. Today, the way to win big, argues bestselling author William C. Taylor, is to relentlessly rethink the everyday. The unthinking assumptions your industry makes about its processes and its customers are ripe territory for innovation. Taylor goes inside nineteen unique organizations that have become unlikely change agents in their otherwise humdrum fields. For example:

·At a 150-bed hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, a shift in language helped the staff feel more invested in patient health--and produced extraordinary health outcomes in the local Native American community.
·Miami Beach's 1111 Lincoln Road is a parking garage that also serves as a wedding venue, apartment complex, shopping center, and social hub.
·USAA, which provides insurance to military officers, teaches salespeople empathy through a simulated overseas deployment in which they subsist on MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) and don Kevlar vests.
·Pal's Sudden Service, a cult favorite fast-food restaurant, delivers unmatched speed and order accuracy thanks to its unique approach to employee training.

Taylor reveals that these businesses share a set of core principles that help them pioneer unlikely innovation: They strive to be the only ones doing what they're doing instead of competing in crowded fields; they don't let past experience limit what they can imagine; they seek ways to be kind as well as clever; and they share they value they create with those who helped create it. By embracing these strategies, Taylor argues, leaders in any industry will be well on their way to upending the status quo, and finding opportunity where competitors didn't or couldn't look.

William C. Taylor is a cofounder of Fast Company, author of Practically Radical and coauthor of Mavericks at Work. He has published numerous essays and CEO interviews in the Harvard Business Review, and hosts a blog on being "Practically Radical" on HarvardBusiness Online. He's written columns for the Sunday Business section of the New York Times and for The Guardian. A graduate of Princeton and the MIT Sloan School of Management, he lives in Wellesley, MA, with his wife and two daughters.