Ever wonder why when you have a spare moment, no matter where you are, whether it’s waiting in line, at a stoplight at an intersection, or at the coffee shop, you pull out your phone and check your feed. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Facebook feed, a Twitter feed, a Snapchat feed, or News feed that you are subscribed to.
Over the last few days, a memo has been circulating from a fired Google employee regarding hiring, biological differences between humans, and why some humans may be better suited for some roles than others.
We certainly live in interesting times, don’t we?
Isn’t “May you live in interesting times” an ancient curse?
Lately, it’s been very interesting watching entrepreneurs of all stripes coming out for and against the political situation here in the United States and the effect of citizen action, amplified by social media.
In my view, the theme I’ve talked about several times over the years on my blog and this forthcoming book that I’m writing called So Where’s My Flying Car? is that innovation requires freedom. It requires the ability to think freely. It requires the ability to put your filters to the side no matter what they’d be whether they be legal, ethical or whatever. It requires the ability to suspend any kind of restrictions on what you can think about and do, to push the envelope.
Soon, Americans will go to the polls in their mostly yearly practice of getting interested in the workings of the state, and make a choice which they will have to live with for the next four years or so. In think, in this election especially, the world is watching, reviewing, and in some ways, trying to understand what seems to be an arcane electoral process which was put together over 200 years ago, by different men in different times. Even the dates were picked allowing for the kind of travel at the time – nowadays, why would it take two months for someone to move from wherever they lived to the White House?
In two different recent articles, both Singapore and Sweden were singled out as leading the way in two completely different, very innovative directions, both of which seem disruptively innovative compared to the United States. Typically, when you see lists of the worlds most innovative countries, something like number of patent filings of new ideas is used to determine that number. Most times, the United States is far ahead in that regard, although China is catching up (it remains to be seen what China is actually patenting and whether or not it really is more innovative than what the United States and the rest of the world is doing).
In the very first episode of Silicon Valley on HBO, eccentric billionaire Peter Gregory is doing a TED Talk (of course, what else do eccentric billionaires do?) completely dissing the whole concept of going to college. He is heckled by someone in the audience, an older, white-haired bearded gentleman who shouts that he’s a “dangerous man” and after a short exchange, storms out of the hall, calling him a “fascist”.
Recently, I got to thinking that there are really are two kinds of innovation, and these two types of innovation were very apparent in the kind of programs I would run for companies. Borrowing a term from physics, I like to call these two types of innovation “theoretical” and “applied” just like theoretical and applied physics.
Got into a great discussion at lunch yesterday with a colleague on the state of affairs in innovation – most of it was the same kind of opining one normally hears about the future – one of the questions most asked is – whatever happened to the flying car?
Recently, I was discussing with a colleague of mine the state of affairs at companies that we used to work with and for and we found some interesting parallels: in most of the larger companies, no matter what the industry, there seemed to be a common thread: