Bernard Garrette > Quotes

“Johnson was an experienced, highly successful retail executive, described by some press reports as “an industry icon” who “turns anything he touches to gold.”
― Bernard Garrette, Cracked it! How to solve big problems and sell solutions like top strategy consultants

“Complex problems require useful knowledge from different domains to be integrated and the diversity of perspective this provides helps to discover innovative solutions. Problems amenable to design thinking need teams composed of diverse problem solvers.”
― Bernard Garrette, Cracked it! How to solve big problems and sell solutions like top strategy consultants

“When problem solvers have deep experience in a particular domain, their knowledge is salient and easy to recall, which can lead them to pay more attention to characteristics of the new setting that seem similar and ignore those that are different, and to develop superficial analogies and poor solutions.14 Experience can be a poor guide when working outside your area of expertise or when the nature of your work changes.”
― Bernard Garrette, Cracked it! How to solve big problems and sell solutions like top strategy consultants

“When we face complex, human-centered problems that we understand poorly, such as the one Ron Johnson faced at Penney’s, we should avoid framing them by analogy with others situations. Instead, we should invest in understanding problems from the perspective”
― Bernard Garrette, Cracked it! How to solve big problems and sell solutions like top strategy consultants

“Conventional wisdom suggests these people should be chosen for their intelligence, experience, and expertise . But as we’ll see, being smart, experienced, and well-trained may not be enough. A systematic problem-solving method is also necessary.”
― Bernard Garrette, Cracked it! How to solve big problems and sell solutions like top strategy consultants

“If you want to know how a lion hunts, don’t go to a zoo. Go to the jungle.”
― Bernard Garrette, Cracked it! How to solve big problems and sell solutions like top strategy consultants

“The remedy is to think about problems more thoroughly, search for missing information, double-check every clue, weigh the pros and cons, and investigate all possible hypotheses”
― Bernard Garrette, Cracked it! How to solve big problems and sell solutions like top strategy consultants