Innovation! Isn’t it Great?! We just love talking about innovation and thinking about innovation, and tweeting about innovation. But we actually suck at it, for entirely human reasons. There are 3 things we need to understand about our own humanness in order for us to unleash our own potential (and the potential of our organizations): [...]
Tag Archives | Innovation
Going from Suck to Non-Suck
I mentioned last week I wanted to get you more insights into books I think are worth attention. Today, I want to share with you Peter Sims new book, Little Bets. Peter is a Silicon Valley type, from Stanford…and he’s written a great book that anyone could use and get something from. If there was [...]
Lesson from the Precipice
More than once I have stood at the very edge of a precipice before a grand vista, and each time has given me an unforgettable experience. The Grand Canyon, Yosemite’s Half Dome and the top of the Eiffel Tower can all thrill me like nothing else. Or they can terrify me, setting my knees aquiver, [...]
Rejecting New Ideas
All innovation starts with ideas. Sure, we talk about innovation as disruptive, or global, or related to market moves, and certainly spread over social media but the universal element of all innovation is this: an idea. And while I think most people like to think of themselves as innovators or at the very least, able [...]
Can Anyone Innovate?
As I went around the country last year giving leadership, innovation and collaboration talks at major companies and conferences, I started to hear the same question over and over again, and it amounted to this: Who is allowed to drive innovation? Now the actual questions that came up sounded more specific than that. If asked [...]
Why I’m Glad I Got Fired
I came to be an expert on collaboration because Carol Bartz both hired me and fired me — within 18 months. Here’s what happened. A friend of mine, Godfrey Sullivan, asked me to consider running the operations for the Americas unit at Autodesk. Only sheer politeness kept me from hanging up. Autodesk? Yep. That CAD [...]
EA’s Collaboration for Growth
The gaming industry certainly has been getting a lot of attention, especially with new entrants like Zynga creating wide-spread buzz and adoption. Add to that the iPAD and mobile gaming phenomena, and you know that traditional style game companies have to be thinking about how to compete in this new landscape. The execs at EA [...]
Apple’s Startup Culture
At the recent All Things D conference, Steve Jobs described Apple’s (AAPL) culture as “that of a startup.” Why? Is it because he is nostalgic, yearning to rebuild the company he founded nearly 35 years ago? Is he reflecting a passion for the innovation and entrepreneurship so often inherent in startups? Or is he saying [...]
Love Process, not Fear Ambiguity.
Have you ever started some new project, some new challenge — all excited to make an impact — and then feel overwhelmed? A friend of mine was describing her first few days in a new leadership role. She’s starting with a thinking exercise — a strategic review of what’s working, what needs fixing, where are [...]
Same Approach, Same Results
Company leaders often say to me “we need to innovate faster” and we need to increase our yield of ideas to market. It’s a core area of competitiveness. But what is interesting to me is that their emphasis on this is often how many talented engineers they have, and how may patents they file, and [...]