Who are you trying to please?
What are you promising?
How much money are you trying to make?
How much freedom are you willing to trade for opportunity?
What are you trying to change?
What do you want people to say about you?
Which people?
Do we care about you?
(and after each answer, ask 'why?')

Ref: Seth Godin

Coach more, direct less
Good executives and managers inspire their staff to develop their confidence and skills so they can seize critical "big game" opportunities.

Celebrate passing
Break teams into smaller groups of three to six to increase the number of triangles where team members can pass ideas and responsibilities.

Everybody touches the ball
Find one or more key responsibilities for every player. Don't relegate team members to the corporate equivalent of football linemen who rarely touch the ball.

Teach overlapping skills
Create opportunities for team members to assume nontraditional roles and push forward initiatives. Invite techies to brainstorm big concepts and sketch out ideas and encourage those with less technical bent to access technology issues. Find out team members' unique passions and interests, and put them to work.

Less dribbling, more goals
Encourage the sharing of ideas and initiatives. Solo dribbling can give a project the critical first push, but then you need teamwork to bring a project home.

Ref: 10 faces of innovation by Tom Kelley

Five “discovery skills” separate true innovators from the rest of us.

The Innovator (1) talks with 10 people—including an engineer, a musician, a stay-at-home dad, and a designer—about the venture, (2) visits three innovative start-ups to observe what they do, (3) samples five “new to the market” products, (4) shows a prototype he’s built to five people, and (5) asks the questions “What if I tried this?” and “Why do you do that?” at least 10 times each day during these networking, observing, and experimenting activities.

Reference: Harvard Business Review

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.

-General George S. Patton

It’s the journey between pages or screens, not the pages and screens themselves, that can cause the most problems for users. Plus - problems with the journey are the most expensive problems to fix.

Design the journey between states first, before designing the states.

Reference: 101 things I learned in interaction design school

Design depends largely on constraints. … Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem—the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible—his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints….

—Charles Eames

UX matters