Does The Click Moment build upon your first book, The Medici Effect? It is related, but it is not a part two. The Click Moment really says that great success comes from combinations of different concepts, and that those combinations are essentially random. You do not really necessarily know ahead of time if some- thing is going to work or not. While The Medici Effect focused on the combinations part, this book focuses more on the random part. What this book says is that serendipity and randomness has far more to do with success than we think — but that there are ways to harness [randomness] and that the ways to harness are endless. And so the book first explains why that is, because we have a hard time believing that success can be so much unplanned. We like to think that there is a plan behind it, because if we just analyzed it, we could figure out the right answer, and that that is the way we sort of drive towards success. But the reality is, it is not. The book goes through three ways in which we harness randomness, in which we can capture serendipity. That is it in a nutshell.
Is your book based on research as well as your experience working with the companies that you have consulted for? A lot of it is based on the experience of working with companies and research, of course, and also a philosophical argument. When The Medici Effect was published, there were probably another 15 innovation books at the same time that came out — two others from the same publisher that same month, from Harvard Business Review Press. And so how do you stand apart? Well, the way it happened for me was that one
day my wife came home. She was working with JP Morgan Chase as a diversity consultant, and she said that she had just been tasked to find a busi- ness case on diversity. And she said, “You know, I think your book is the answer.” And I was like, wow. I mean, in my mind, I was thinking maybe scientists or chief innovation officers or marketing folks [would be a better fit], but literally, within a month, I was presenting to the head of JP Morgan and he said there is something here. And that led to chief diversity officers everywhere [bringing] me into their company to talk about how diversity drives innovation. The CEO of the company usu- ally would then have me go and talk to the head of business, or sales, or marketing, or strategy, or something like that. And then all of a sudden I was