Providing tips, tricks and insights into how to be more creative, innovative, resourceful and personally effective.
Curiosity
Curiosity is arguably the single strongest driver behind innovation. It’s an abiding dissatisfaction with the status go that drives us to endlessly seek better answers and better ways and better ideas.
Creating Time
What might you accomplish if you gave yourself more time to reflect, more opportunities to experiment, more innovations to pursue? What could your organization achieve if everyone did that? How much more time could you create?
Inevitable Innovation
What are you doing to make sure you catch the coming wave of innovation in your business? What are your competitors soon going to be doing that you’d better be doing too? Such trends can be extremely difficult to predict but when they hit you have to be ready for them.
Who’s Really “Smart?”
What drives innovation (and success generally) is not what someone already knows, but what they’re capable of inventing or discovering, what new insights they can acquire. It’s a willingness to treat existing knowledge as a source of possibilities, rather than conclusions.
Dumb Questions
It may take just one instance of casually brushing off someone’s idea, or simply ignoring it, to forever lose that person as a source of innovative thinking.
Innovation is Fun!
Promoting innovation isn’t just about getting people to volunteer their ideas. It’s about moving away from traditional top-down, command-and-control, closed loop management techniques. Moving instead towards a more challenging, more flexible, more appreciative style that’s not only more productive and successful; it’s a whole lot more fun.
The Ten Best Ways to Kill Innovation
Despite a lot of talk about so-called enlightened leadership, the reigning cultural norms are still to conform, follow the program, and don’t question authority. Unfortunately many of our most time-honored management practices are a sure way to undermine innovation.
Outcome-Based Thinking
What is it about goals that makes them such a valuable tool? The simplistic answer is, “So you know where you’re going.” Certainly, any leader needs to have objectives. But a more enlightening answer to the “Why?” question is: Because defined outcomes provide clarity.
Seeds of Change
Without a healthy innovation culture, even the best ideas will die.
If Nothing’s Changing, No One’s Leading
If someone is in a position of authority and nothing is changing, then all they’re really doing is command and control. That may be management but it’s not really leadership.
Innovation Requires Trust
Without a robust and candid exchange of information, no one has reliable feedback. No one is in a position to put all the pieces together and accurately identify strengths and weaknesses. No one can fully measure performance good or bad and identify opportunities for improvement.
Innovating a “Smart” Organization
Do you lead a company, a division, or a team that seems to have a knack for solving problems—or do most of them end up on your desk? Do you have employees who come to you with their proposed solutions—or just their challenges? Do managers in your company celebrate their successes—or whine about failures (usually of someone else)?