Thinking differently: The chronicles of successful people

Find the right question

During his stint as a consultant at a tech company, Freakonomics co -aut hor Steven D Levitt was facing a difficult problem. "The question they were asking was: How can we reduce turnover to keep our subscribers for a longer period of time?" Levitt recalls. He suggested they look at the data. Levitt and his team discovered a quizzical trend: Frequent users of a subscription product were cancelling their subscriptions. Digging into the data, Levitt found that there were customers who used the product frequently, but when they tried to renew, they ran into a credit-card failure.

"No one understood this," he says. "It was in the data, but no one had thought to tunnel down in that exact way."

Schedule time to think LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner keeps 30 to 90-minute chunks of his schedule clear. "If you were to see my calendar, you’d notice a host of time slots greyed out but with no indication of what’s going on," he says. "There is no problem with my Outlook or printer. The grey sections reflect ‘buffers’, or time periods I’ve purposely kept clear of meetings."

Stick to an agenda

Facebook C O O S h e r y l Sandberg brings a spiralbound notebook with her to every meeting. In that notebook is a list of discussion points and action items. "She crosses them off one by one, and once every item on a page is checked, she rips the page off and moves to the next," Fortune reports. "If every item is done 10 minutes into an hour-long meeting, the meeting is over."

Borrow from the best

Game of Thrones author George RR Martin has created a world that people love to live in. But the world isn’t entirely his own. "You look at Shakespeare, who borrowed all of his plots," Martin says. "In A Song of Ice and Fire, I take stuff from the Wars of the Roses and other fantasy things, and all these things work around in my head and somehow they jell into what I hope is uniquely my own."

Change the market

Actress Jessica Alba became a mother in 2008. She couldn’t find any baby products that suited her desires. "I wanted clean, safe, effective products that were affordable and beautifully designed, and I couldn’t find that in the marketplace," Alba said. "There wasn’t really a family brand that spoke to me as a young mom." So she thought to start a company. "People thought I was nuts," she said. Reactions ranged from "Can you just do a perfume or something?" to "Baby diapers? Really?" Yet the diapers have done their work: Now the company has been valued at nearly $1 billion — and is on its way to an IPO.