Every once in a while I get requests from friends and collaborators about mentoring someone. Last week I was contacted by a teacher from a local University who wanted to introduce me to one of her students; a aspiring entrepreneur with a love for technology.
Protect your ugly baby from the hungry beast
The only way to create new value is through innovation, but most companies pay lip service to it. That’s a fact. CEO’s say they value creativity from employees, the type that delivers disruptive offerings that result in new business models, but when push comes to shove CEO’s don’t really want new disruptive offerings; they are more worried about maintaining the status quo than in challenging it.
Most companies fail because they miss the future. It may seem simplistic to put it that way, but it’s true. There are many reasons why, the most common one is because they fail to meet the unmet, unarticulated needs of customers; this is attributed to ignorance and lack of care for customers.
Let me elaborate…
in Innovation, Podcast
Calling all Hungry Minds!
About 5 years ago I started an offline meetup where me and a friend would each invite an interesting person to teach us something; I called it the Hungry Minds. It started as intellectual networking and just learning from someone else; there is no business card exchange. But it evolved into a brainstorm and support group. For example, we asked ourselves some of the following questions:
Every once in a while I get emails from business people and students asking for advice on all types of challenges they’re facing. A recent one has to do with brainstorming for innovation, specifically how to fight cognitive bias so the group can be open to all avenues of the future.
Recently I had some issues with one of the internal fans on mi laptop, which will turn 5 years old in November; so I’m not surprised one of the fans stopped working properly. The problem is the internal components no longer exist because my laptop is a late 2012 model of the HP 15 Envy. So what did I do?
Is empathy overrated? As I posted a few weeks ago, empathy is the greatest creator of human energy; so I don’t believe it to be overrated. Still, there are those who believe too much empathy is not good. One of those people is Psychologist and author Paul Bloom, who wrote a book about the topic. I’ve found it interesting and have been reading and listening to his counter arguments to empathy; the main argument is it’s narrow, biased and therefore puts it ahead of rational thinking.