• Joi Ito is the director of the “Media Lab” at MIT – a place where brilliant creatives come together to grope around on the edge of the inventive darkness in which the future most of us think we see melts into things far more mind-blowing. In his recently released book Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, Ito quotes Google's Larry Page, from this 2013 interview in Wired magazine:

[M]ost companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change.

If you’re a leader, there are nine words there that are worth repeating and burning into your organization’s memory: incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time.

I was reminded of these words and Ito’s principle of “Risk over Safety” as the internet took note of the significance of Monday’s date: the 10th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ memorable reveal of the first iPhone at Macworld. That iconic moment radically altered not just the smartphone world, but how we interacted with technology on a far more fundamental level. Even beyond that, however, the development of the iPhone exemplified Apple at its absolute best — bypassing mere incremental advances in favor of aiming for exponential ones, even at the expense of their own current products.