To encourage experimentation, tell your employees there’s no such things as failure.
How to daydream productively
“I don’t have time to think about this right now, I need to get things done.”
How often do you hear this everyday?
I was recently reminded of the importance of having “thinking time”, reflecting on what you’re doing instead jumping straight to execution.
Having time to think about a problem your trying to solve often takes the back seat to execution, but often the key to finding a novel solution to that problem is to stop thinking about it and “daydream”.
When I was a young boy my parents sent me to the Silva Mind Control Method course (best investment ever!), and one of the things I was taught was the importance of letting your mind rest. According to our instructor back then, our brain makes the most connections when we’re sleeping and therein lies new solutions to problems.
There is a technique that we were taught for getting our brains into Alpha, a state similar to sleep called the 3 to 1 technique.
Your first start by getting comfortable and closing your eyes, take a deep breath and when exhaling in your mind repeat the number 3 three times and relax your body.
Prague Duet buy Do the same for numbers 2 and 1 and this will put your mind in a very relaxed state where all you’ll hear is the sound of the air in your lungs.
I’ve found that this technique is also great for taking 15 minute power naps which are great after lunch.
Hopefully you’ll find this helpful.
Why failure is important
Why are people afraid of failure? Failure’s not just part of life, it’s essential to life — and to success. Henry Ford put it most eloquently: “Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently”. You can’t learn if you don’t fail.
The fact is all people will fail more than a few times in our lives.
We tend to learn more from our mistakes than our successes. At our best, we turn them to our advantage. Thomas Edison once said, "I make more mistakes than anyone I know. And eventually I patent them."
Failure is an essential ingredient of innovation — if companies are risk averse, they’ll never develop breakthrough products or create new markets.
The value in failure is the fact that the more you fail — if you treat failure the right way — the more you succeed. The point is to turn failure into learning by not making the same mistake twice.
According to Dr. Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford University, coping with failure is a mindset problem:
If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mindset like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence.
Children with fixed mindsets would rather redo an easy jigsaw puzzle than try a harder one. Students with fixed mindsets would rather not learn new languages. CEOs with fixed mindsets will surround themselves with people who agree with them. They feel smart when they get it right.
But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mindset feel smart when they’re learning, not when they’re flawless.
Michael Jordan, arguably the world’s best basketball player, has a growth mindset. Most successful people do. In high school he was cut from the basketball team but that obviously didn’t discourage him: "I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game wining shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
If you have a growth mindset, then you use your failures to improve. If you have a fixed mindset, you may never fail, but neither do you learn or grow.
If you don’t risk failure, you’re not trying hard enough.
26 ways to unleash innovation right now
To innovate continually and reliably you must build an organization that’s innovation friendly, here are 26 strategies to get you started right now.
- Encourage dissent. The Brood movie full Without it, ideas will flow in just one direction, from top to bottom. You already have the best marketing resource at your fingertips: your frontline personnel. They interact with your customers everyday and they are much better judges of what customers want and will accept that those who watch from headquarters.
- Look where your competitors are not looking. Innovators appear to see farther ahead only because they see farther to the side. They see change coming because they see it already under way in domains their peers are ignoring. Develop a wide angle view of the world. Look for trends or themes that cut across multiple businesses; eventually those trends will show up in your business arena. Because you’ve been paying attention to realms beyond your specific industry, you will be able to coordinate and respond more skillfully to your environment.
- Exploit your past heritage. Knowledge of your past anchors your innovation more firmly, allowing you to grow it to greater heights.
- Ignore experts. Their know-how works best in familiar situations, but poorly in new territory. The cumulative weight of experience can restrict their perceived options to what they have seen work before. This kills off new ideas before they are given their due.
- Question the truth. When everyone believes something, their belief will slow them from copying you. They will leave open a path for you. Prove their truth is wrong.
- Look for an unfair system. This is a sing that the system is stuck and will eventually correct itself. You want to already be in a position when that happens, awareness presages opportunity.
- Create a more exciting future. This will encourage your followers and discourage your competitors.
- Be the second mover, not the first. This lessons is hard to swallow, the early lead rarely lasts.
- Be wary of success. It breeds complacency and sometimes arrogance. When your company has won one race, celebrate and then move quickly to a bigger one. Success marks the end of a story and leads us to expect nothing further. Unless you want your story to end, celebrate briefly, then create a new measure of success.
- Assemble a dream team. Give them just one job: to think about the future. Choose people from different backgrounds and at different levels, give them the tools they need and then stand back and wait for the magic.
- Let people explore radically crazy ideas (manage for creativity). They are the seeds of innovation. Give people the freedom to explore, think, imagine, create. Empower them.
- Build creative spaces. People need space to think, create, discuss, collaborate. More often than not great strategies are born over the water cooler than in the boardroom. Do you have “war rooms” where people can brainstorm? If your people wanted to bounce ideas off each other, where would they go?
- Hold longer meetings. Short meetings allow insufficient time for deep dialogue, so instead they become reporting sessions. If you want time to play with ideas, to explore options, to test beliefs, hold just a few meetings but make sure they are longer.
- Meet in smaller groups. Large groups leave too little “air time” for your discussion to reach any meaningful depth. Everyone in the group feels pressure to contribute, and emerging ideas get trampled as the next person rushes to speak. Allow only three to ten participants in strategy discussions.
- Turn everybody in your organization into strategists. If they don’t participate in creating and evaluating your strategy, they will not fully know it, own it or act on it. Take advantage of your frontline managers market know-how by inviting them to participate.
- Give your strategy a name that sticks. This helps people understand and align to it. Make it simple, concrete and emotional.
- Do not compete. The highest form of competition is to become so unique that no competitors will consider you a threat.
- Count your deserters. If innovative people want to leave, you have blocked your innovation cycle somewhere.
- Write a legend. Nearly every innovative company has a story that captures, spreads and reminds people of a companywide value critical to continued success.
- Pursue the long and short term simultaneously. No initiative can succeed without hard work in both dimensions simultaneously.
- Decentralize decision making. Build adaptability and agility into your organization by giving your people greater autonomy to make decisions in a rapidly changing environment.
- Run fast and slow. Match your decision cycles to outside change, shorter cycles mean more strategic flexibility.
- Invoke a moral purpose. Not only will it make you feel good, but it has a more practical reason as well: it will make you more competitive. By linking your success to a cause others care about, you strengthen the loyalty of your people and customers while you erode the support of your competition.
- Be ready for a big change. You cannot predict change but you can learn to recognize it and be prepared to act on it when it surfaces.
- Abandon the past. It is an anchor that exists only in your people’s minds. The past repeats itself only if you let it; if you want the future to look different, you should not hold on to how you got here. By retelling the past, drawing out what will help you get to where you want to go and sending to the background whatever is stopping you, you free your people to move forward.
- Keep it simple. In most cases, simple thinking overpowers complex analysis. Good ideas originate from the direct experience of an astute individual far more than from the spreadsheets of an expert.
Anything missing? What else would you add?
Get a coach to give you perspective
The Hit ipod DOA: Dead or Alive dvd
One thing people are never good at is seeing themselves as others see them.
Here’s a great piece of advice from Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
The advice that sticks out I got from John Doerr, who in 2001 said, "My advice to you is to have a coach." The coach he said I should have is Bill Campbell. I initially resented the advice, because after all, I was a CEO. I was pretty experienced. Why would I need a coach? Am I doing something wrong? My argument was, How could a coach advise me if I’m the best person in the world at this? But that’s not what a coach does. The coach doesn’t have to play the sport as well as you do. They have to watch you and get you to be your best. In the business context a coach is not a repetitious coach. A coach is somebody who looks at something with another set of eyes, describes it to you in [his] words, and discusses how to approach the problem.
Watch the rest of the Best Advice videos from Fortune for more useful insights.
RIP Michael Jackson
Battlestar Galactica: Razor movie full
Like other people in the world I grew up with Michael Jackson’s music and still can’t stop listening to the tunes. I still remember the videos of me emulating Michael’s moves and doing (trying!) the moonwalk when I was 5 years old in my grandparents house. It seems it was only yesterday!
Michael was my first idol, I thought how cool is this guy having such a huge impact in the world…I want to be just like him.
It sad to see the King of Pop go but on the other hand I’m glad that I was influenced by him.
Thank you Michael!
Leadership lessons from Abraham Lincoln
Lately I’ve been thinking about leadership and it’s impact on others. I found these 8 leadership principles from Abraham Lincoln to be clear, concise and exemplary of of good leadership practice and thought I share them with you.
Lincoln on Leadership is an extraordinary treatise on leadership. Is demonstrates coherently and comprehensively how Abraham Lincoln sought to manage those who helped him preserve the United States through the perilous and agonizing years of the Civil War.
Consider the principles of Leadership that Lincoln spoke of and consistently used to govern is managerial conduct:
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Advocate a VISION and continually reaffirm it
CIRCULATE among followers consistently
Build strong ALLIANCES
Search for INTELLIGENT assistants
Encourage INNOVATION
PERSUADE rather than coerce
Influence people through STORIES
Be RESULTS oriented