PETER SIMS is an entrepreneur and best-selling author. His latest book, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, explores the question of how people and organizations can recognize and discover revolutionary ideas by using the experimental innovative approach practiced inside Apple, in military counterinsurgency strategy, and at Pixar, among others. Even in a more risk averse era, Sims offers ways of thinking and working that will enable you, your teams, and your organization to become more innovative and effective.

Little Bets grew out of a collaboration with faculty at Stanford?s Institute of Design (the d.school), a hub of creative thinking and doing, and his previous work in venture capital with Summit Partners, where he worked with some of the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and was a part of the team that established Summit's European Office in London.

He was also the coauthor with Bill George of the best-seller True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership, is a member of G.E.'s Innovation Advisory Panel,and is a Co-founder and Director of Fuse Corps, a social venture that places entrepreneurial leaders on year-long grassroots projects with mayors and governors to tackle some of America's most pressing problems. Peter is a graduate of Bowdoin and the Stanford University Graduate of Business.

Leadership
True North genre: Good to Great (Jim Collins), What Got You Here Won't Get You There (Marshall Goldsmith), The Speed of Trust (Stephen Covey)

Peter shares the stories and lessons he has learned from some of the world's most-respected leaders, including both their successes and failures, from his work on leadership while at Stanford Business School as well as to research True North. True North picks up where Jim Collins left off in Good to Great: how do people go from good to great leaders?

Sims led the research of the leaders profiled for True North, including Starbuck's founder Howard Schultz, CEO of Palm Inc. Donna Dubinsky, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric, Oprah Winfrey, Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, Narayana Murthy of Infosys, Andrea Jung CEO of Avon Products. Themes include:

• How to lead yourself effectively, including knowing your personal story. For example, Howard Schultz, the founder and CEO of Starbucks, wants to build a company where his father would be proud to work. He gets his inspiration from his early life memories. When he was 7 years old, his father broke his leg and lost his job, as well as the family's healthcare insurance and the family struggled to get by. That is why Schultz wanted Starbucks to become the first US corporation to provide healthcare benefits for both its full-time and part-time employees. Schultz uses his personal story to connect with and inspire his employees.
• How to use personal failures and setbacks to grow. Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, had one of his best learning experiences when he dramatically failed to hit his operating targets during his mid-30s. He took a lot of heat from then CEO Jack Welch, but Immelt recovered and grew enormously through the difficult time.
• How to effectively lead from your values during times of economic turmoil. Great leaders, like Narayana Murthy and Anne Mulcahy, know that when times are difficult, more than ever, their people respond to their values. Mulcahy saved Xerox from bankruptcy in 2001 by using her values (and the company's values) to call out the best efforts from Xerox's 96,000 employees. Mulcahy and her team miraculously turned the company around. The Xerox story is just one of many from top leaders: executives and managers use their values to weather difficulty.

Other topics:

• How to "let go" of the need to control everything and empower others.
• Developing effective relationships with colleagues.
• Effectively using feedback - for yourself and other people.
• Clarifying your personal values and motivations.
• Having an integrated life: being the same person at home as at work.
• Teaching others how to be leaders.
• How to develop support structures with mentors, friends, and family.
• How to reduce stress during difficult times.

Little Bets (strategy, innovation, creativity)
Little Bets genre: The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell), The Black Swan (Nicolas Taleb), A Whole New Mind (Dan Pink)

Little Bets(a forthcoming book from Simon & Schuster: Free Press) is about a creative process of experimental innovation that uses little bets to build up to great outcomes. Instead of trying to decide the best thing to do with limited information, little bets help people do things to learn what they should do in new territory. This approach has emerged from an unlikely collection of people: from creative artists, to bootstrapped entrepreneurs, to military strategists, to agile software developers, to Japanese car manufacturers, to the rapidly growing field of design thinking.

Based on rigorous research about what works and what does not, Little Bets uses examples as far-flung as Chris Rock, Beethoven, Toyota, Frank Gehry, and Pixar to describe a method for "learning by doing," using sophisticated methods of iteration and testing that employs six core principles: orient to a strong mission but be flexible about the output; experiment to learn quickly by failing fast; immerse in the real world to understand problems and needs; define specific problems and opportunities; generate creative possibilities; build around small wins, and, iterate repeat, refine, test, and build - a series of small bets that can open unlikely transformative opportunities and outcomes.

• Being willing to fail often to accomplish great outcomes. Comedians like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld must make thousands of little bets, most of which fail, in small comedy clubs over many months before they hone an hour-long act that that they can take on TV and tour. This is a difficult and often uncomfortable process, even for well-known figures like Rock and Seinfeld, but their hard work and determination eventually leads to world-class performances.
• The research, such as from Clayton Christensen, clearly demonstrates that organizations decline and fail when they become too rigid and risk-averse. Or, as Jeff Bezos at Amazon says, "What's very dangerous is not to evolve." Little bets are an antidote: a way of thinking in the unknown that starts with problems and needs and encourages adaptation based on facts, not opinions.

Read more about Peter Sims book, Little Bets

Read Peter Sims Harvard Business Review article, Discovering Your Authentic Leadership