As another day at the Las Vegas-hosted IBM InterConnect event drew to a close, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, met with Amy Wilkinson (@amywilkinson), author of The Creator’s Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs and lecturer at Stanford, to discuss her book, its implications and the future of entrepreneurship.

Six essential skills

Outlining the basis of her book, Wilkinson described it as the result of interviews with the founders of over 200 major companies, both tech-based, such as with PayPal, Youtube, and Tesla, and otherwise, and with companies like Chipotle and UnderArmor. The interviews were intended to uncover what sorts of skills linked these founders in their professional and philosophical approaches to business, and the end result, explored in more depth in the book, narrowed it down to “six essential skills.”

The simple version of this list includes finding the gap, driving toward lights, flying the OODA-loop (observe, orient, decide and act), failing wisely, networking minds and gifting small goods. Wilkinson found that these practices were employed by her interviewees in personal practice, as well as being applied to their company models, and emphasized that these were all “learnable, teachable accessible skills.”

Speeding up and looking outwards

While the book’s data is based on sets of data from the US, Wilkinson (who had just returned from six weeks in Asia working to promote the book’s release) felt that there was significant data for a similar volume to be drawn from ideas coming out of China, India and other places around the world, citing the utility and application platforms of Alibaba and other Chinese developments.

Wilkinson also noted that as “technology is speeding everything up,” necessitating the employment of these skills at higher rates to match, further developments in each region are breaking through, along with new options for “harnessing the brain power of people who are very far away.”

Wilkinson expressed some surprise at how much interest her book was gaining in the corporate spaces, particularly with interest from companies in how to create within the constraints of a large and pre-existing structure. Tying this to her work with Stanford University, Wilkinson drew parallels to how “the MBA is becoming something that’s individualized more and more,” and pointed toward innovations likely to come more from baby boomers than the “risk-averse Millenials.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM InterConnect 2016. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE