Innovation and people in the 21st century
Companies innovate only their people are innovation-driven...
The future of your company depends on your will to foster a growth mindset at all levels of your organization. If you see recruiting as “filling” positions with warm bodies, their love of your company can only be short-lived. As soon as they feel bored and stuck, it’s only logical that they’ll try their luck next door. So start recruiting to build up the organizational brain plasticity and learning capabilities needed to simultaneously better address fast-changing times and strengthen employee enthusiasm.We hire people. We create employees, by culturally attuning ourselves to the world they live in. Emotionally intelligent leaders are emotional-data-oriented. Just like they constantly have to watch their sales performance dashboard, they also have to check on the cognitive and emotional markers that reflect their employees’ belongingness. Culture isn’t an abstract set of values, but a connectional fabric whose cognitive and emotional dynamic makeup needs to be perpetually assayed when we want to ratchet up productivity, resilience and effectiveness. Culture is what we cultivate.
Beyond Eureka! analyzes twelve common questions. This selection results from conversations with the dozens of aspiring innovators in organizations of all sizes that I have advised in the course of my career and my own experience as a serial CEO in the technology industry. The questions are simple, but you’ll find that they often congeal around a collection of questionable assumptions and inferences drawn from inaccurately reported or over-simplified examples.
1. Are you an inventor or an innovator?
2. What is a typical innovation journey?
3. Do you need to be disruptive?
4. When is the right time?
5. What is a window of opportunity?
6. Can competing innovations coexist?
7. Why is standing out challenging?
8. Can David thrive in Goliath’s world?
9. Where is the right place?
10. Do you need to be connected to succeed?
11. Are women and minorities unwelcome?
12. How can organizations remain innovative?
Sometimes we come up with magic, sometimes we don’t . . . but regardless of the size of the dent we’re able to put in the universe—to paraphrase Steve Jobs’s expression—and even if we fail, we may still meaningfully contribute to the world.
