A while back, I wrote a blog post about the two kinds of people in the world, the ShouldWes and the DoIts. You can go back here to read the full post, but in short, the DoIts are the action takers, the ones who see or generate an idea they want to move forward on that idea, no matter if the idea is incremental or disruptive, they want to take the risk and develop the idea, get in in front of customers and see if the idea lives or dies.
Prior to the widespread adoption of the web and the internet, I used to run something called a Bulletin Board System (BBS), where we would use phone lines to communicate on message boards. Every so often, our message boards would call each other and exchange messages, thus allowing us to communicate (this was in a time when long distance calls actually cost money, so the updates sometimes only happened once a day).
As I mentioned in a previous post, our culture and technology are making it much easier to survive and thrive in the world as an introvert, and in so doing, more and more of us are becoming introverts. With the ability to work from home, and have everything delivered 24/7, there are many people who are taking that route. Some of your best people prefer to interface with others through the internet and in non-face-to-face interactions.
Change in surroundings lead to a change in thought
What do they call it when expert after expert proves beyond a doubt that something exists and is roundly agreed to be the case, but is then summarily ignored, even though the findings are real and true?
We hear a lot about profitability and ROI in my business – some of my clients innovation groups need to continually justify their existence day-in and day-out, since, for some reason, every innovation initiative always seems to need to be tied back to some level of profitability – it needs to cut costs or increase revenues out of the gate (or even before the gate) before we can even think about it.
As an innovator, disruptor and creator of new things, I love coining and using new words which can more effectively describe something, and solutioning is one of them.
Be honest, when some people hear the word “innovation” all they think about is airy-fairy, pie-in-the-sky visions of a perfect world where everything goes right, with no connection to the world of today. Nothing could be further from the truth, but for some reason, these prejudices persist. For some, innovation is not something we are doing today, but something we may do tomorrow, and right now, we aren’t concerned with tomorrow – we just want to get through today.
In a survey of CFOs completed by Robert Half last fall, the main reasons why innovation is floundering comes down to three main points:
By this, we mean the long and convoluted process many companies use in order to process (although it sometimes feels like squash) innovative new ideas.
Peter Thiel, one of the billionaire founders of PayPal, recently announced that he is leaving the Bay Area, mostly due to ideological reasons (he is a libertarian and supported Donald Trump during the 2016 election). He is relocating himself and his business to Los Angeles in order to escape what he calls the perceived Silicon Valley monoculture – which he likely sees as extreme progressivism. Similarly, last year Tim Ferris moved to Austin from the Bay Area, “alarmed by what he determined to be an increasingly prevalent closed-mindedness and lack of inspiration“.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – you hear via email or in an offhanded remark during a meeting that an awesome employee who you know (let’s call her Sophia), an intelligent, expressive and creative individual, is no longer with the company.
What exactly is innovation, and do you know how to innovate?
Innovation is truly a moving target – what is innovative in some industries is old news in others – I’ve been in some meetings where I’m simply astonished at what is presented as “innovation”. In many cases, it’s a small incremental feature which pushes the company to at least get slightly closer to their competitor (who is typically leading in their space) to the implementation of the companies product and service on a different platform. Oh, look! We have an app now! We are on iPad! (Of course, 90% of the app just links back to the companies website, which, in some cases, is not even mobile friendly!)