Left on Red: How to Ignite, Leverage and Build Visionary Organizations Hardcover - 2008 - 1st Edition

From the jacket flap

What does it take to build a company capable of changing the world? Constant innovation, and ideation? An obsessive, almost insane sense of urgency? Business Velocity and IQ? In Left on Red, venture capitalist and recognized innovator Bill Glynn presents an insider's view of the way great businesses are built.

Visionary, game-changing companies like Google and Apple don't just appear out of nowhere. Instead, they are built by maverick leaders and business commandos willing to throw the rules out the window and disrupt the status quo. They don't just "think outside the box"--for them, there is no box at all. With great personal, financial, and social risk, true innovators throughout history have overcome the most complex constraints society can throw at them. Naysayers, deal prevention teams, and the social order, like red lights, are meant to slow or stop progressive movement. Taking a left turn at a red light or driving right through it--like real innovation--is dangerous, a little crazy, and certainly a lonely sport not for the weak-willed. But if you have the guts and smarts to try it, the rewards are well worth it.

Most companies stifle and discourage their most creative employees and leaders. Only today's best companies constantly and perpetually seek out visionary employees, encourage ideation, and use every means necessary to improve their business and products. Those companies know how to build a business environment that promotes innovation and rewards risk-taking. Left on Red shows how they do it, revealing the way today's best business leaders implant innovation and change into the very DNA of their businesses.

Corporations are inherently risk averse, yet taking risks and breaking rules is the only way to truly innovate and compete. If you're an entrepreneur or an executive, Left on Red provides the insight, ideas, and examples you need to build the kind of culture of innovation and creation that's necessary to survive the systems and markets meant to keep you and your team bottled up.

Those people who change the world are mavericks and free thinkers who choose to swim against the current, cut against the grain, or turn Left on Red. For anyone who has a vision and wants to build a business that's unique, exciting, and different than anything that's come before, this book will show you the most direct route to innovation. It will teach you how to overcome red light people and systems along the way. Left on Red points out the obstacles and people that stand in the way of progress and warns that someone will end up being crushed under the weight of change. Will it be you or them?