When the time comes for you to leave an organization, don't count on the next person owning your ideas and initiatives the way you did. Don't count on them at all - the bureaucracy doesn't rise to the occasion to replace you well. Designate a natural stopping point while you're in the seat. So what should you look for? Look to naturally culminate components of what you've created by the time you leave. You have built tools and a brand that they can use in their own way. If you want them to be impactful, you need them to be agile for the way the next person wants to use them - not scripted for them. Use your success to enable the next person to be a founder.

Don't let the bureaucracy over-invest in you. The bureaucracy will want to kill you. Think of Sun Tzu and the Art of War. Don’t let your adversary know you are it's adversary. Don’t skyline yourself as an innovator, or the bureaucracy will train its eyes on you to defeat you. Practically, it also puts too much pressure on the innovator if you are skylined too early. Innovation is about iterative design. Don’t force yourself as the innovator to defend yourself during the iterative process. Wait until your solution is too good to ignore.

Don’t build programs, find innovators and disruptors. Invest in them. You can manufacture them. You identify them. Pour the support you would have had for the founderless innovation office, into the next disruptor.

“Innovation” offices cannot survive beyond the founders, they simply become part of the bureaucracy at that point. Think of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. He only invests in companies that still have their founder. His philosophy is that once a Founder is gone, they never truly innovate again. They might maintain market share and come out with interesting products, but they won’t come up with a revolutionary product. Once an exciting new innovation program is handed off from its founder, you can't expect the new leaders to truly own and lead the program. It’s not human nature to inherit something and truly make it one's own. Innovation is meant to disrupt the bureaucracy, but these offices that remain simply bloat the bureaucracy over time.

Don't try to be something other than what you are. Don’t listen to that voice. It's distracting you from being you. You will be a horrible version of someone else. You're an incredible version of you. If you are truly you, if you embrace your skills, your authenticity and fully own that - you will bring the best version of yourself, and no one can compete with that. It's your competitive advantage. Build a world around your strengths. People will respond to that - because it's real, and people crave real.

An innovator must be a wolf, bucking the security of the system. A wolf must be a risk taker. A dog has chosen the security of an owner. It will never understand or embrace the actions of a wolf. Don’t waste your time.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” - Maya Angelou. You must be able to read people. If they show indicators that they are a bureaucrat, never build a plan that requires them to be innovative, or even just flexible. Listen to your intuition. If that means you must walk away from an opportunity, then do so. Don’t toil endlessly “hoping” they will see the light. There are other opportunities that deserve your attention and time. Remember, prescriptive paths lead to bogs in the bureaucratic swamp.

People are what they are, especially in a bureaucracy. Don’t expect them to change. When you have an opportunity, but you need a person in a critical position to do something to make it happen, you must take stock of them. Are they the type to go on a limb? Is it the environment for them to do so? You can usually tell right away. A Colonel that is retiring within a year, is no longer trying to make his mark on the institution. He may see great merit in your cause and has a desire to help, but you can see from your first interaction whether he has enough self interest in the project for him to step up to that cause. Typically it’s no, despite his best intentions. Don’t build programs or projects that rely on people to fight their own human nature.

Head nods from your audience prove you connected with them over a shared belief, value, or knowledge. Storytelling is all about connecting with your audience. Audience head nods are like the person at Disney Land that boarded a roller coaster. Your story is the roller coaster, their head nod is them sitting on the ride. Now take them on an enjoyable ride of discovery.

We are educated on facts without context. Your brain can't process disconnected facts, it needs a story arc. Don't let decision or meetings be governed by diving in to standalone facts. Storytelling is leadership, because you're creating structure, and giving people a foothold on their place within the structure and the vision. Your audience is only there if you bring them there.

Storytelling is the key to success. Get people to believe with a story. When you're telling a story, everyone can follow the story arc. They can believe their own version of the story, but they can't take your testimony from you. People don't remember facts, they remember stories. They will stand on the story in different parts than you will, and that's what you must count on. It allows them to tell the story in their own way within their own organization.

There is more knowledge at are finger tips than ever before. We don’t lack knowledge, we lack wisdom. We hear voices from every direction. You must learn to discern what is wise and what isn't. That’s where your values come in. Look to the source of your values for perspective and judgment, rather than some fad of what is smart today.

You must make sense of it in your own mind, or you will not be successful. People often ask Brandon how he can speak to so many topics of emerging tech in public forums, how does he hold so much information in his mind? The key is how you sort your information. Create a logical framework for every category you are working. Each of those categories must fit into a logical framework of organizational mission, or personal interests. Then as you ideate around a specific area, say 5G, your engagements with partners, and your refinement of the use cases naturally populate knowledge into the appropriate place within your mind.

Make decision on wisdom, not emotion. Be grounded in some vision of the future that allows you to see your efforts clearly. It's not about removing emotion, but achieving clarity of thought about what our objectives are, what our environment is. Decisions based on fear or ego or uncertainty or other emotions compromise your judgment.

To lead, you must create order out of chaos in your own mind. No one can follow you into the unknown, if they only see chaos. You must think hard to create order when others only see chaos, if you are to lead them. Otherwise they will resist you with every “what if”. But clarity of thought, enables your own wisdom and decisiveness.

Every pilot should improve your technical understanding. Are you doing science projects, or are you actually achieving something? Everything sounds good, but is it shiny, or is it worth your effort? It's only worthwhile if there's a catcher's mitt for all the energy you've expended. You must have an understanding of how this will help advance your understanding.

Get out there and create something, never wait for permission. If your design has merit and you are wise in execution, then your results will stand on their own merit. The currency in a bureaucracy is words, but out here in the real world, we have to execute. Wisdom is best wielded in action, not words. Who cares if they don’t believe, prove it.

You won’t have time to exploit, if you are spending your time exploring. Outsource the exploring. You still want people to know you are open for business, but you can no longer be the greeter at the door. “Be Too Busy to “Do Coffee” from Naval Ravikant  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/naval/id1454097755?i=1000437527357

Recognize when you should be in the Exploration stage and when you should be in the Exploitation stage. You must go through an exploration stage first, where your knowledge and intuition is built up. But then you must transition to an exploitation stage where you simply trust your intuition and act on the wisdom. Don’t be sucked into exploration any more.  Know what is worth exploiting and what efforts simply don’t produce much opportunity. It is a natural progression. It’s like the difference in the “sewing” season and the “reaping” season. Then you learn what is worthy of your time and how to choose fertile soil for “sewing” next season.

Work on a specific idea or collaboration to find a path forward. Let those specific plans lead to general plans. Too often the Pentagon seeks to make a plan, but they live in the generic. This allows all sorts of “what ifs” and uncertainty to muddy the water. The bureaucracy wins the day as caveats and inaction sets in. Even at the local level, you must recognize when the uncertainty of the general seeps into your plans. Dive into the specific and let that set the course, for generic “rules” or plans later.