Tag Archives: Leadership

How to Practice The Art of The Possible

in entrepreneurship, Innovation, Leadership
everything is possible

Illustration by Christian Laborin

Innovative leaders and organizations practice the art of the possible.

What is the key trait all innovators have? Curiosity, which enables them look beyond the obvious and consider possibilities.

Innovation is about new, surprising and better options. You don’t get to see these better options in your mind’s eye without having a positive outlook, yet not every vision survives contact with reality; ideas need to be challenged.

Some people either love or hate the last part.…

Obsession: The Difference Between Good and Great

in entrepreneurship, Greatness, Innovation, Leadership
Obsession beats talent

Illustration by Christian Laborin

Survival in the 21st century demands a ceaseless obsession with your customers and with the possibilities that new technologies can offer them. When hiring or collaborating, we want to work with the most talented people. But have you ever thought about the most obsessive? Unlike naturally talented people, the most obsessive will challenge you and make you better. …

A User Manual To Working With Me

in entrepreneurship, Greatness, Leadership

A User Manual To Working With Me

Empathy, collaboration, creativity, leadership are future-proof skills everyone needs to have; which are in short supply. So, how do we embrace, develop and put these skills to work in a world where collaboration is an imperative?

We can begin by setting expectations about ourselves, clarifying our intentions and being accountable. How?…

Reframing Resistance to Change

in entrepreneurship, Greatness, Innovation, Leadership, Psychology

we can't change people to our view if we don't understand theirs

No standard behavior change, no innovation. It’s that simple. True Innovation results in a step-change where we can’t imagine going back to the old way, but the road to that outcome is full of rejection. It’s hard to overstate how important this is: if you’re not getting rejected you’re going the wrong way.…

Change a Behavior if You Want to Change a Result

in entrepreneurship, Greatness, Innovation, Leadership
English: A collage of an image modified with 1...

English: A collage of an image modified with 16 different Instagram filters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I started 2017 will a couple of posts about reinvention (here and here). Fittingly, Recode published a look into Instagram’s reinvention. The story goes that a few years ago, Instagram was seeing a dip in sharing and engagement on their platform. Driving this change was the mass of brands and celebrities sharing and promoting as much as they can, lowering the quality of friend and family interaction Instagram became known for; the user experience they set out to create with Instagram.…

4 Challenges Organizations Face To Get The Most From Generalists

in entrepreneurship, Innovation, Leadership

generalists

New challenges require new approaches. All organizations have new challenges on the table all the time, but most are not equipped to come up with new approaches to conquer them because they can’t think and act differently.

This is a specialization challenge.

As a rule of thumb, your business needs more generalists than specialists if it wants to innovate. Don’t get me wrong, specialists are valuable. But Generalists are the innovators, the ones who are most capable of dealing with complexity; the ones that connect that dots.

Yesterday I joined Innochat to chat about T-Shaped people and culture for collaborative innovation (see transcript). I’ve written quite a lot about Generalists (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here), so I won’t touch on here the well known factors about being a Generalist, hiring and managing.

Instead, I’ll touch on the challenges……