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The Innovation Stack

“This book won’t make you an expert any more than writing it made me one.”

If you’re looking to this book to be the one thing you need to beat Amazon or become Wall Street’s next darling, you can stop reading now. It won’t. And I’ll go a step further: you can stop reading altogether. Because there is no one magic bullet to make you a great innovator, or a great entrepreneur. Instead, I invite you to look at it this way. Innovation is not a single event. It’s a series of real-world problems solved in brand-new ways. And, in my view at least, true entrepreneurs are those who can stack those ideas and create something no one has ever done – and something no one else can copy.

That’s what The Innovation Stack is all about.

I’ll show you how it worked for me, and I’ll introduce you to a couple of other problem solvers, too – people and companies you may have heard of, but whose stories you might not know. And who knows? Maybe, along the way, you really will find the inspiration you need to create the next big thing.

The Birth of Banking

When my publisher told me that The Innovation Stack couldn’t be a graphic novel I was bummed, so I teamed up with an incredibly talented artist and created a full fledged comic book. The Birth Of Banking tells the story of A.P. Giannini’s quest to solve an age old problem, and how his company’s innovation stack helped rebuild San Francisco after the great earthquake of 1906. This company, named The Bank of Italy, later became the biggest bank in the world—The Bank of America.

Art of Fire

Beginning Glassblowing

Studio time is expensive. Unfortunately, most glassblowing students still learn through a combination of apprenticeship and observation - a slow and inefficient method. The Art of Fire teaches you quickly how to manipulate the glass through a series of structured lessons and exercises, including use of safety exercises to prevent burns, inclusion of a companion DVD with 5 hours of video instruction for you to view, over 500 photographs and illustrations to improve your understanding of the glassblowing process, step-by-step instruction for all basic techniques, and fixes for more than 50 common problems.