The Creator's Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Amy Wilkinson The Creator's Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs Simon & Schuster (February 17, 2015), $19.89 (softcover), 240 pages"creativity supersedes credentials."The Creator's Code is based on hundreds of interviews with the very men and women who actually create the frontiers of commerce and industry by which the rest of us follow. Through extensive interviews with some of the most creative minds today, and having crisscrossed the litany of industries and organizations to identify common traits among pioneers, Amy Wilkinson has prepared a must-read book for anyone who aspires to turn a would-be creation into a successful business venture. Wilkinson (2015) presents compelling first-person accounts of entrepreneurship in action, and in the process distills the essence of entrepreneurship into well-defined and categorized practices: Find the Gap, Drive for Daylight, Fly the OODA Loop, Fail Wisely, Network Minds and Gift Small Goods. Measuring just six short chapters, The Creator's Code (2015) is also a pleasurable and fast-paced read.In each chapter, the reader is introduced by example to one of the six facets of the entrepreneurial code. The book opens by describing three types of creative personalities - The Sunbird, The Architect, and the Integrator - where each personality type utilizes a particular approach to identify unmet needs and formulate an opportunity. Much like the mythical Phoenix, Sunbirds resurrect old technologies and methods, adapting and updating them for other purposes. "Sunbirds transport solutions from one place to meet the needs of another." Integrators, like Sunbirds, build on existing knowledge, but do so by melding potentially disparate techniques into a unique solution. Founder Steve Ells describes in detail how Chipotle was formed based on a marriage of culinary quality with fast-food service. Architects such as Elon Musk, on the other hand, create new practices out of whole cloth using first principles. When considering the costs structure of space travel, Musk is quoted as saying "I could compress the cost of everything else, but I got stuck with the cost of a rocket", and so he formed SpaceX as a "... forcing function for technology improvement."In each of the subsequent chapters, Wilkinson (2015) digs deep to identify and describe particular practices of truly extraordinary entrepreneurs, successfully weaving together multiple threads from across a variety of industries. Under Armor, SpaceX, Uber, and JetBlue are just a few of the more recognizable companies used to crack the entrepreneurial code. I particularly enjoyed Wilkinson's incorporation of memorable sayings to encapsulate and highlight particularly relevant attributes, such as: "Focus on the horizon." and "Set a failure ratio." Combined with the compelling testimony of established creators, fully-formed vignettes are developed to epitomize each attribute that makes up the code. And, while my memory of the precise anecdotes that comprise each vignette will surely fade, the short, actionable phrases will persist for much longer.The chapter titled "Drive to Daylight" contains one such vignette worth noting here. The introduction to this section is a useful note of caution: "Avoid Nostalgia". Wilkinson (2015) then goes on to describe one company's decision to essentially remove one branch of the company in order to save the rest. …