I’m sure you’ve been in meetings where everyone worries about competition more than they worry about customers. It is a fact that for traditionally run businesses, any talk about strategy quickly shifts to competition. It’s unavoidable and it pisses me off. Traditional business practice is based on beating the competition, which assumes that there is competition that looks and plays just like you if you are starting a business. …
Category Archives: Leadership
5 questions to help you think about the culture you wish to create
Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Why? Because even a beautifully conceived strategy won’t be executed the right way if people’s values and beliefs are not aligned. In other words, culture is not mandated; it is shaped from the beginning.…
How do you know which rules are worth breaking?
Want to spark innovation? Kill some stupid rules.…
Want people to believe innovation applies to their role? Give them a reason to care
in Innovation, Leadership
Among the many innovation myths businesses take as givens, I believe the most common and disruptive one is “innovation doesn’t apply to my role”. When this is the case in most organizations, and when just one-fifth of employees report believing that their workplaces strongly value them; it’s worth asking, “Is innovation everyone’s job?” And what would make employees feel they are innovators?
In a traditional organization, innovation isn’t everyone’s job. But in a maverick organization, it’s a given that everyone sees his/herself as an innovator. …
6 uncommon questions to help you shift your perspective and poke holes at the status-quo
It all starts with a wild question. In the tech industry, it might be, “what if people could carry their whole music library in their pockets? iPod. In the automotive industry, it might be, “what if a supercar could also work as an electric car? Porsche 918. …
The benefits of thinking and doing BIG
BIG ideas get all the attention by the media, bloggers, journalists and the like because Big ideas, like anything that is coming out of Google X, have the possibility to create waves of change for society.
Businesses that want to call their latest and greatest invention the next best thing should be thoughtful about what it is they are promoting. Though we can all tell BIG from SAME, there is no shortage of entrepreneurs calling their latest venture The New Thing; frankly most of the time it isn’t.
So, to determine whether or not something is really The New Thing we can use the following criteria: it’s new, surprising and radically useful.
The more precise one is about what “innovation means and looks to us”, the more focused the efforts will be and thus the more interesting one becomes. From a business relevance standpoint, beyond the media coverage one gets, thinking and doing big has other benefits as well:…
What is a mindset and why does it matter?
If you are really ambitious, I believe that rather than setting out to accumulate as many material things as you can, you should be aiming to spread mindset; a point of view. This blog is very much focused on innovation as a mindset, not as a collection of tools and frameworks that anyone can pickup and magically turn him/herself into an innovator. …