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…
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.
A friend of mine who recently embarked on his own entrepreneurial journey figured out that he doesn’t like dealing with people who suck at follow through. You know who they are: people who don’t follow up, forget, make excuses, disappear, and are energy and time wasters to those of us who make stuff happen.
I said, welcome to the club!
We live in a fast moving, complex and uncertain society where industries lines are fading. It’s always been this way, but the accelerating adoption and integration of technology somehow makes it more pronounced and obvious that everything is indeed connected. In this environment, people and companies that survive and thrive are those who know how to learn; fast.
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?
