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Peter Sims

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries Paperback – July 16, 2013

by Peter Sims (Author)

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“An enthusiastic, example-rich argument for innovating in a particular way—by deliberately experimenting and taking small exploratory steps in novel directions. Light, bright, and packed with tidy anecdotes” (The Wall Street Journal).

What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, and the story developers at Pixar films all have in common? Bestselling author Peter Sims found that rather than start with a big idea or plan a whole project in advance, they make a methodical series of little bets, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins.

Reporting on a fascinating range of research, from the psychology of creative blocks to the influential field of design thinking, Sims offers engaging and illuminating accounts of breakthrough innovators at work, and a whole new way of thinking about how to navigate uncertain situations and unleash our untapped creative powers.

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publication date

July 16, 2013
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.56 x 8.38 inches
ISBN-10

1439170436
ISBN-13

978-1439170434
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"'Little Bets' is a big idea. Here's my bet: if you're passionate about innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship, you need to read this book!"--Alan M. Webber, Co-Founding Editor, Fast Company magazine, Author, Rules of Thumb

""Little Bets" is a timely and compelling book that will change the way you think, a roadmap to success in the 21st century. And, a very enjoyable read."--Peter Georgescu, former CEO of Young & Rubicam

"I have always believed that constant innovation is core to success. The methods Peter Sims provides in the highly engaging "Little Bets" will help you challenge the status quo and discover extraordinary new possibilities in whatever endeavor you're engaged in."--Howard Schultz, chairman and CEO, Starbucks

"I really can't say enough about this book;" Little Bets" rings so true to my own experience at Teach For America. Peter Sims does a huge service by showing the world how big entrepreneurial and innovative successes come to be -- and in the process reveals ways of thinking that aren't the product of anything elusive or enigmatic but rather of traits we can all learn and foster, such as openness, inquisitiveness, and perseverance."--Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder, Teach for America

"In "Little Bets", Peter Sims convincingly argues that we need a new model of creativity, focused around gradual improvement and constant innovation. If you're not learning while doing, Sims points out, then you're probably doing it wrong."--Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide

"Peter Sims buries the myth that big talkers with brains and big ideas move industry and science forward. This modern masterpiece demonstrates that the most powerful and profitable ideas are produced by persistent people who mess with lots of little ideas and keep muddling forward until they get it right. "Little Bets" is easily the most delightful and useful innovation book published in the last decade."--Robert I. Sutton, Professor, Stanford University, New York Times bestselling author of Good Boss, Bad Boss

"Peter Sims' exciting new book, "Little Bets", is replete with stunning insights about innovation and the remarkable benefits of backing many creative initiatives that yield the big breakthrough. Corporate leaders everywhere can benefit from his sound advice."--Bill George, Professor, Harvard Business School and Author, True North

"Want a big idea? Start little. Whether you're an entrepreneur or an artist, Peter Sims shows you how big breakthroughs start with little bets."--Chip Heath, author of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard

"With examples that range from traditional businesses to stand-up comedians, Peter Sims shows that the path to big success is lined with small failures. Behind every breakthrough idea is often a host of experiments that flopped -- and Sims shows how to leverage these "little bets" to produce lasting results. This is a powerful and practical book."--Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and Drive

"A fascinating and revealing journey through the real-life dynamics of the creative process. Vividly written and bustling with examples from comedy to architecture, "Little Bets" is a wonderful example of itself: a big idea that takes shape through many small discoveries. I highly recommend it for anyone with a serious interest in cultivating creativity in business, education or in their own lives."

About the Author

Peter is a bestselling author and the founder & CEO of Black Sheep (BLK SHP). After working as an investor in venture capital with Summit Partners in London, Sims became an accidental author, as the coauthor of True North, the bestseller that has been selected as one of the top twenty-five leadership books of all-time. After that, he stumbled into Stanford’s Institute of Design and learned product design and design thinking, an experience that helped Peter view himself as a creative for the first time, so he dedicated himself to writing his second book, Little Bets, for all those with untapped creativity. A top resource for innovators, it was selected as one of the six best advice books for entrepreneurs by the Wall Street Journal and Sims has been a senior advisor at X, The Moonshot Factory, Google’s semi-secret innovation laboratory. Previously, he cofounded FUSE corps and was part of the initial team of collaborators that started Giving Tuesday, the global philanthropic movement that raised roughly $10 billion in over 100 countries for social good causes. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College and Stanford Business School. In all that he does, Peter feels most at home as a creative entrepreneur and innovator, contributing to making the world a bit more human.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (July 16, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1439170436
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1439170434
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.56 x 8.38 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #73,453 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #490 in Business Motivation & Self-Improvement (Books)
- #511 in Motivational Management & Leadership
- #575 in Entrepreneurship (Books)

Customer Reviews:
395 ratings

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Peter Sims

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Peter Sims is an accidental author and creative entrepreneur. His book Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, was selected as a one of the six best advice books for entrepreneurs by the Wall Street Journal and as one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and Inc. Magazine. He was also the coauthor with Bill George of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership, which was a Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek best-seller.

See more at: http://petersims.com

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

395 global ratings

5 star		68%
4 star		21%
3 star		6%
2 star		4%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Fail Quickly to Learn Fast

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 14, 2011

Verified Purchase

"The writers for the humor publication the Onion, known for its hilarious headlines, propose roughly six hundred possibilities for eighteen headlines each week," reports Peter Sims in his fascinating book, Little Bets. That's just a three percent success rate for headline writers. Yikes. Or maybe not yikes.

Subtitled, "How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries," we quickly learn--through dozens of mini-case studies--that innovation comes through hard work, experimentation and bosses who are cheerleaders for failure. (And I would also guess innovation happens with a healthy dose of weekly staff encouragement, motivation and hoopla-type fun. I mean, what if your best headline ideas were ranked 19th each week?)

Example: Comedian Chris Rock tests, tests and re-tests every joke--and every word--for up to six months (or even a year) at his local comedy club before he takes his hour-long act on the road or on national television.

Example: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has built an "experimental discovery mentality" so that "whether or not employees are doing so is a part of their performance reviews."

The author adds, "Like Chris Rock, Bezos has accepted uncertainty; he knows that he cannot reliably predict which ideas for new markets will work and which won't. He's got to experiment. One such example is a feature the company launched that would compare a customer's entire purchase history with its millions of other customers in order to find the one person with the closest matching history. In one click, Amazon would show you what items that customer purchased.

"`No one used it,' Bezos has said. `Our history is full of things like that, where we came up with an innovation that we thought was really cool, and the customers didn't care.'"

It's all about making a series of little bets--not one humongous bet--just little ones with the hope that just a couple will pay big dividends. "Experimental innovators like Rock, Brin and Page, Bezos, and Beethoven don't analyze new ideas too much too soon, try to hit narrow targets on unknown horizons, or put their hopes into one big bet. Instead of trying to develop elaborate plans to predict the success of their endeavors, they do things to discover what they should do. They have all attained extraordinary success by making a series of little bets."

The book surprised me. I expected cute little success stories like, "Well...I just flipped the spaghetti onto the wall--and it stuck!" Instead, the innovators of little experiments were actually productive creative teams of "rigorous, highly analytical, strategic and pragmatic" people. There are no step-by-step formulas.

Instead, there is a focus on five fundamentals: 1) Experiment (fail quickly to learn fast); 2) Play (a fun environment never snuffs out or prematurely judges the ideas--the case study on Pixar is amazing); 3) Immerse (get out with customers and learn from the ground up); 4) Reorient (make small wins and necessary pivots); and 5) Iterate (repeat, refine and test frequently).

Caution though: this approach is a 180 plunge from what the profs taught us. He quotes Sir Ken Robinson, "We are educating people out of their creativity." Plus, most management approaches are all about reducing errors and risk--not giving license to having a good whack at a half-baked idea. Goodness, this is God's money we're wasting!

So...is this just one more niche business book--a good read, a few memorable stories--and then back to real-life-in-the-trenches? Hopefully, no. Leverage the insights of Little Bets in your planning process--with one mega-caveat. "The fact is that much of what we would like to be able to predict is unpredictable. Global market movements, political and cultural complexities, and demographic shifts constantly reshape the ground beneath us. This certainty of uncertainty is becoming ever more evident with the accelerating pace of technological change. The Internet has reduced communications barriers and allows new players from different corners of the world to rapidly emerge and compete globally. Thus a key flaw with the top-down, central planning approach is how limited it is in allowing us to be limber and able to discover new ways of doing things."

Yikes...I've exceeded my prudent word limit--but I have another 100 paragraphs or whole pages of Little Bets highlighted you'll have to discover for yourself. BTW, I read this on my new Amazon Kindle--and love the highlighting and note-making options. Perfect for airplanes; but not as easy to pass around the room during my workshops and board consultations! I'm still undecided about it.

12 people found this helpful

Helpful

Steve Keifer

For Those Innovators Not Waiting to Get Hit in the Head by an Apple

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 21, 2012

Verified Purchase

The media often leads us to believe that many of the famous celebrities we see on TV and the successful technology CEOs we read about in the newspaper are born with special, secret powers. These special powers enable them to effortlessly dream up innovative ideas that the rest of us could never imagine. There are also fairy tales about another group of innovators who don't have special powers, but are the lucky beneficiaries of freak coincidences that lead to ingenious designs or theories. Sir Isaac Newton gets hit on the head with an apple then discovers gravity. In Back to the Future Doc Brown hits his head then comes up with a design for the flux capacitor.

In Little Bets, Peter Sims debunks many of these myths. While there certainly are prodigies in the world for which innovation is much easier to come by, many of the world's most creative artists and companies actually have to work quite hard to achieve their results. Sims provides detailed examples of how companies ranging from 3M to Pixar and artists ranging from Beethoven to Chris Rock, arrive at innovation through a series of incremental steps (little bets) to discover, test and develop new ideas.

The book is full of interesting theories which challenge the traditional approaches to innovation and management that big companies often take. Sims explains how companies such as HP fall victim to the tyranny of large numbers by only pursuing $1 billion opportunities that others have already capitalized upon. He also explains what is known as the HiPPO phenomenon which occurs at companies - the Highest Paid Person's Opinion (HiPPO) usually dominates how people makes decisions inside organizations. Sims also covers some familiar principles such as Fail Fast and Early Adopters in greater depth than I have seen in other works.

The writing style is amazingly easy to read. A storytelling approach similar to Malcolm Gladwell's approach is used to explain the principles.

I rated it only four stars, because I did not find the book to be quite as compelling as some of the other amazing books that I have read recently. But I would not hesitate to recommend investing a few hours to read it.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Dr. Peter Davies

Little and focused

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 19, 2014

Verified Purchase

This is an excellent short book. It's divides innovators into conceptualists and experimenters. This book is very much on the side of the experimenters- it sees overarching concepts as something that can be useful- but which are often unhelpful.

The book illustrates well the idea that multiple small steps towards a goal, our even just taken out of curiosity to see what will happen, are usually the best ways to make progress. Most progress comes from small steps- that cost little, don't take long- and are basically "little bets." A little bet is a diversion you can take that may or may not work, but the worst you'll lose is some small amount of money, and a bit of time. Most ideas don't work out as planned- and often the big idea or concept emerges as an outcome of what starts off as quite a small idea or project. The key thing seems to be to know what problem you are dealing with- and to break it down into small workable chunks.

The world is largely divided between conceptual thinkers who then work out the details, and other people who work with small chunks, and eventually discover what they are really a part of. Little bets offers something to both groups. The conceptual thinkers have good ideas- but they are rarely entirely right- or exactly what customers and others need. Sometimes big visions take so long to implement that by the time they are achieved they are obsolete. A bit of work with little bets often will save such grand projects from being misdirected from the start. The experimental types will enjoy trying experiments- and won't lose too much capital or emotion in building up a magnum opus that turns out to be misdirected. The key is to learn from the experiments, and keep moving on.

This book does move on briskly and entertainingly with many good examples and ideas. I can recommend as a good little bet to readers- it won't take you long to read and you'll quickly come away with several useful ideas from it.

5 people found this helpful

Mikolaj Pietrzyk

Oldest truth backed with newest examples

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 26, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book is not a game changer, nor does it bring about breakthrough ideas, but at least it does not pretend to do so. That's already a merit. Even the title is somewhat modest and humble especially when compared to shouting headlines of some top selling business books. I'm even tempted to call the writing itself modest. That's rare and worth apprising. It feels good to be treated seriously as a reader.
In a nutshell, Sims' book refreshes a simple idea of how productive and valuable it can be to work in small steps. He calls these steps "little bets" to illustrate risk management opportunities coming with gradual development rather than big bets of putting every resource behind unproven ideas. In doing so Sims accomplishes to address two objectives. Firstly, he manages to convincingly combine the examples backing up his reasoning from as diverse backgrounds as military operations (counterinsurgency ops in Iraq), animated movies production (Pixar) and some more. He successfully avoids a trap of putting different examples artificially bind together. Secondly, by reviving little steps approach what I guess is a concept as old as humanity, he brings back to live some worthy advice not necessarily limited to business. It reminds of values that sometimes tend to be neglected as they miss the flavor of being dynamic, rule-breaking and so on (any buzz-word would fit it). Specifically, though it is not literally stated, I take his book as praise for achieving the goals gradually, or if I can risk to by pathetic, it is simply praise for patience. Sims calls for experimenting, for allowing (yourself, or your team, or your company or your... well, you name it) to fail in order to learn, but that's on the surface of his reasoning. Behind it there is the need for perseverance, for not being discouraged by early mistakes, but rather to build on what only seems to be a weakness but in fact takes a lot of courage - admitting one has failed. That is how professionals do it, and some vivid examples are to be found in the book. From that point of view I find it a valuable work. The message is: slow down, don't stop trying, and be focused. It is deconstructed into couple of concepts some of which are taken from different authors (there is great review of suggested further reading at the end of the book - really helpful, even for those who might be disappointed be the book). One example is the rule of moving from "expected gains" to "affordable losses" point of view while weighing whether to i.e. start a project or provide financing as an investor. As simple as it might be, and let's admit it - not eye-opening - it deserves to be reminded and thought over again and again. Besides, it is a very short read and the investment exposure in terms of time involved is not too big. So why don't you make this little bet and buy the book.

2 people found this helpful

Pasquale Mellone

Simple but effective strategies

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 3, 2020

Verified Purchase

I loved this book for the simple and effective strategies, backed up by examples, you can apply. Also it's particularly interesting the bibliography with great references if you want to further expand on the topics. Some of the examples in the book tend to digress but other than that this is definitely a book I would recommend to entrepreneurs and business owners

Simon Gray

Little Bets but great ideas! Very inspiring!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 26, 2013

Verified Purchase

I read this book in a day and found it very inspiring - I couldn't put it down! Great examples of idea generation which challenge the traditional way we make business decisions. The real life examples demonstrate how this method can yield results in a much more fun and flexible way. It's changed the way I will test ideas going forwards - thank you Little Bets!

T. P. Duong

Very good read, full of inspiration

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 24, 2013

Verified Purchase

Little Bets is a short but sweet book containing many, relevant examples of how creative and inspirational companies and people have got to where they are by trying, and failing often. There are 10 chapters in total which, if you read this book on your daily commute, you won't take long to finish when compared with other business books. However, each chapter is crammed with useful tidbits which will make you re-think the way you approach work, and life.

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