Here’s a typical scenario…
You’re an employee at a large organization, have been there for a while. You see opportunities to make things better, you talk to people, some doors open then they close. You’re frustrated because you can’t make progress. You start thinking about all the ways everything could be better if you only had a chance to apply your ideas.
Does this sound familiar?…
A couple of months ago I republished a list of all the ways Misfits (innovators) are misunderstood in the workplace and what they want from their boss to be able to get along with them. It got a great deal of attention immediately after I published it, many Misfits empathized with the list; non-misfits probably didn’t.
So for all of you non-misfits, today I’m going to elaborate on a key attitude of a Misfit: being a contrarian. …
Yesterday I gave a talk to Foxconn employees and Directors about culture and how it drives innovation. A good way to frame culture is like this: what you reward and what you punish.
With that said, turn your attention to the following tweet:
Illustration by Christian Laborin
If you ever meet me, know that I’m a giver. I really like understanding and helping people, it makes me feel good. I’m the type of person who needs to feel someone’s pain, so it’s natural for me to want mind meld and have a heart to heart with someone. I just can’t discard someone’s pain as if I’m the most important person in the world! …
Innovation has many enemies, but the one you can count on to rear its ugly head all the time is expertise. You see, true innovation is something new, surprising and radically useful; it’s an order of magnitude better than what currently exists. Expertise driven innovation results in incremental improvements, which is good for stability; but it hinders progress when it comes to making leaps.
We’re living in exponential times, the Big 5 tech companies – Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook – occupy the top 6 spots of the most valuable companies in the world, thus driving the Next Economy. It’s safe to say that we live in a world dominated by technology.
This means the way we work, collaborate and do everything on a daily basis changes; and organizations that don’t adapt will certainly become irrelevant.
The status quo police is back, the innovation killers, with yet another article about how we should embrace maintenance because innovation is overrated. Last year I put my two cents in on this same topic and argued that though innovation has become diluted and meaningless maintenance is overrated.
