I used to have six aquariums, the smallest was a 25 gallon, six inch deep room divider and the largest was 100 galleons.
One day I moved a small, about four inches, black ghost knifefish from the 25 gallon tank to the 100 gallon aquarium. Over the next year it grew to about 11 inches.
This happened because fish grow based on the concentration of a chemical they secrete into the water. Nature stops growth when the concentration indicates that the environment won’t support them further.
Human beings grow similarly—they will grow as long as the environment they are in supports their growth.
Curiosity, investigation, discussion, dissent and debate are the chemicals humans secrete, but the most important is curiosity.
Limit curiosity and you limit growth; shut it down and growth stops cold.
This applies just as much to parenting as it does to managing or “leading.”
Just think what would happen if each of us worked to encourage unlimited curiosity, investigation, discussion, dissent and debate in our own little corner of the world.
Think of the growth that would be unleashed; the happiness that would be generated; and the difference between that world and our present one.
A great deal of innovation, including those with the potential to change the world, is done not just by entrepreneurs, but internally in corporations.
Fast Company offers a list of what it considers the 2011′s 50 Most Innovative Companies. Some are innovation standards, while others will surprise you, however number 21, DonorsChoose, innovative or not, is a sad commentary on US education.
Innovation, like sex and love is often progressive, with one idea often leading to another. First off, now on the Web, the two have progressed from sex (general and nitch porn) to love (general and nitch dating sites) to infidelity. Obviously, if someone works their way through these sites sequentially then the next needed innovation is divorce, which is provided by Tim McNamara at ClearViewDivorce.
The next three are my personal favorites, because they address my personal needs so perfectly.
Liquid glass looks like a solution to any problem surface that I want smooth and easy to clean.
A new wall panel made by National Gypsum called Thermalcore seems like a great way to cut my heating bills when I finally remodel.
Finally, my office faces my front yard where I feed dozens of birds, a few squirrels and the occasional hawk that stops by for a starling lunch and I enjoy them through three large fixed pane windows. Unfortunately, the birds often crash into the glass, but a German company has solved that problem. I’m replacing the panes with Ornilux.
Earlier this week I mentioned that changes were coming to MAPping Company Success.
The main reason for the changes is I’m bored and if I’m bored I’m sure to bore you. Additionally, with the release of Option Sanity™ I’m more involved with startups and entrepreneurial issues (meaning startups that are focused on becoming sizable enterprises as opposed to small biz or home-based biz).
However, my focus on MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and its effect on company culture, management, retention and motivation is applicable to anyone, whether in a startup, self-employed or working for a larger organization.
There are some specific changes coming.
Wordless Wednesday will focus more on applicable or interesting videos (you have no idea how difficult it is to find good subjects for WW).
As I mentioned yesterday, Leadership’s Future will be come an occasional feature on a different day and Thursday’s focus will be on the stories of specific entrepreneurs.
Sunday’s Quotable Quotes will occasionally share its day with a new feature focused on odd facts and stats.
Tuesday’s Ducks in a Row, about culture, and Saturday’s Expand Your Mind, with links to articles of interest continue.
Another change is to invite guest posts from you, my friends and readers. 500 words or less on a topic of your choice, as long as it is relevant to the broad focus of MAPping Company Success and you believe it would be of interest to others.
Of course, none of this is carved in stone, so I would love to hear additional suggestions from you.
Last, but certainly not least…
HAPPY NEW YEAR
I wish you and yours a healthy, happy, adventurous, exciting and successful 2011!
It’s funny, most bloggers release products, immediately write about them on their blogs and then all of their blogger friends write about them. It’s logical to do so, even reasonable.
So why haven’t I done it? Actually, I announced it in August, but there was no reaction or comments you, my readers, or any of the bloggers I contacted (but more on them in another post).
Going forward, I thought it would be fun to share some of the challenges, problems and results of our marketing effort, since it turns on subjects about which I frequently write.
In case you don’t remember, Option Sanity is a totally new, values-based way to allocate stock options, with a focus on fairness. It levels the playing field and even makes investors happy.
To give you a much better understanding of how it works, here is the video tour. There is additional information on the website and for those who are really curious, you can play with the full app demo and post your thoughts, opinions or questions here or on the review page.
Lot’s of talk about creating a culture of innovation, but often that’s all it is—talk.
The most important factor in a culture of innovation is the ability to fail.
India’s Tata is a leader in creating a culture of innovation and Sunil Sinha, an executive in Tata Quality Management Services, discussed its approach recently at Harvard.
Sinha described a culture of innovation at Tata that includes employee-awards programs for both successful and unsuccessful ideas. What’s important, Sinha said, is that employees feel comfortable in bringing forward ideas, even ones that don’t pan out, and that they feel they work in a place that values fresh thinking.
The innovation culture has produced several notable products, he said. One is a water purification system that costs just $20 and produces enough water to keep a family of four supplied for more than a year.
Not only that, but in 6 short years, from the time its CEO publicly mentioned the idea in 2003, Tata Motors produced a $2500 car for sale in developing worlds; it’s a small, two-cylinder car that gets 55 miles per gallon and meets all of India’s vehicle emissions and regulatory requirements.
Done in spite of all the global pundits who said it couldn’t be done.
I speak with managers all the time who talk about their desire to enable a culture of innovation and when it doesn’t happen, whether through laziness, benign neglect, or more active negativity, take no responsibility and place the blame squarely on their people.
Saturday I said, “It’s innovation, no matter where it’s done, and MAP that drives jobs,” and that I would expand on MAP’s role today.
Ask people what an entrepreneur does and their description will usually say something about starting a company.
But there is a critical psychological difference between entrepreneurs that has nothing to do with investment, revenue or even employees.
It’s the difference between creating a company and being self-employed—even if you have 50 employees and $50 M revenue.
It’s the difference between trusting others and what those in the startup world call founder ego—the belief that you can do any job better than anyone you hire.
It’s the difference between making yourself central to every action and decision within the company or hiring well, delegating and then getting out of the way, so people can do their jobs.
Simply put, it’s the difference between holding on and letting go.
And it is that difference that often decides not just the company’s success, but whether the founder sticks around or leaves—willingly or with help from the board/investors.
Yesterday you heard the stories of five innovators, so today I thought we would look at some of the things that have been said about innovation and by innovators.
Just so we are all on the same page, let’s start with Theodore Levitt’s definition, “CREATIVITY is thinking up new things. INNOVATION is doing new things.”
Not that innovation is always welcome—never has been, never will be.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky knew that when he said, “Innovators and men of genius have almost always been regarded as fools at the beginning (and very often at the end) of their careers.”
You know the old saying, ‘if you aren’t moving forward you’re going backwards’?
Francis Bacon knew it well and warns all of us, “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.”
The how of innovation has changed radically over the years, but one thing hasn’t changed. True innovation isn’t something about which you can ask for suggestions. As Steve Jobs said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Steve Jobs
To most people innovation is everything. They can’t wait for the latest version, the newest item, the trendiest trend, the bleeding edge, but not everyone feels that way (I don’t).
I tend to the view of Coco Chanel, “Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics.”
Are you middle-aged? Or wonder what you will be like when you are? Then I have great news for you. Creativity and thinking skills—new brain studies show that middle-aged brains are excellent, making new connections and perking along at their prime in lots of areas.
Inductive reasoning and problem solving — the logical use of your brain and actually getting to solutions. We get the gist of an argument better. We’re better at sizing up a situation and reaching a creative solution.
Creativity is a subject that has always fascinated. Why could Rembrandt create magic with a brush while others produced nothing? Many people write, but how many Shakespears has the world produced? What is the difference between them? Perhaps new research will offer some insight.
“Creativity is kind of like pornography — you know it when you see it,” said Rex Jung, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. Dr. Jung, an assistant research professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, said his team was doing the first systematic research on the neurology of the creative process, including its relationship to personality and intelligence.
Creativity often leads to some kind of innovation, but it doesn’t lend itself to groupthink. As I’ve frequently written, creativity happens in those long, silent times when your mind is free to roam. New research shows that this is true.
To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What the pacesetters of the future really require, according to new Wharton research, is some time alone. …a hybrid process — in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers — resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process.
It was so-called financial innovation that brought down the global economy. Five years before it happened Warren Buffett called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction,” but four years before that Peter Drucker condemned that kind of financial innovation.
In a piece he penned in 1999, “Financial Services: Innovate or Die,” he frowned on the kind of transactions that have done such terrible damage to Goldman’s reputation and, more important, to the world economy. Since the 1970s, he wrote, “the only innovations” among banks “have been any number of allegedly ‘scientific’ derivatives.
“But these financial instruments are not designed to provide a service to customers,” Drucker continued. “They are designed to make the trader’s speculations more profitable and at the same time less risky—surely a violation of the basic laws of risk and unlikely to work. In fact, they are unlikely to work better than the inveterate gambler’s equally scientific system for beating the odds at Monte Carlo or Las Vegas.”
Finally, a public service announcement from me to you. No matter how openly you live your life in these days of social networking, I doubt you would post your tax returns of medical records online, let alone send them directly to the bad guys.
But that is exactly what happens when you use a public copier or return a leased one. A decade ago I learned that digital copiers are essentially computers, complete with hard drive, and every document copied is saved on that drive and readable with software that can be downloaded free on the Net. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe CBS News.
Youngme Moonm, the Donald K. David Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, created The Anti-Creativity Checklist, a wonderfully irreverent video incorporating every cliché, past and present, used to kill creativity.
All around us people kill creativity through their frequent, unconscious use, as shown in a quote from last Thursday’s post by Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University, who said, “…no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when you could be throwing your money away?”
Not doing something new because there is no proof that it will work is number five in this video by Youngme Moon, a business professor at Harvard Business School.
Which have you heard recently in your workplace?
Which have you used?
Did their use kill creativity or just put it on hold?
Today’s post will be relatively short, because I want you to take time to read a NY Times article called Building a Better Teacher.
Education is an industry and from any viewpoint, it’s obvious that American education is in trouble—poor quality, low productivity, enormous turnover and bad press.
There is a raging argument about who are responsible—politicos (who hold the purse strings), administrators or frontline workers, i.e., teachers.
There is a move to shutdown underperforming plants and fire those frontline workers en masse.
Out with the old ad in with the new; the assumption being that “new” always means “better.”
In education as in any industry there are innovators and traditionalists—think Steve Jobs and the executives of the music industry.
Innovators: Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Michigan State’s school of education assistant professor, part time math teacher and originator of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, and Doug Lemov, teacher, principal, charter-school founder and author of Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)
Traditionalist: Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University, who favors policies like rewarding teachers whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks skeptically upon teacher training. [because]… no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?
Hmmm, there was no market research to show that a personal music player would sell before the iPod changed history.
Read the article, it points the way to changes that will affect you no matter your age or if you have kids.
Changes that will determine America’s future.
Image credit: St Boniface’s Catholic College on flickr
I used to have six aquariums, the smallest was a 25 gallon, six inch deep room divider and the largest was 100 galleons.
Lot’s of talk about creating a culture of innovation, but often that’s all it is—talk.
Not only that, but in 6 short years, from the time its CEO publicly mentioned the idea in 2003, Tata Motors 
produced a $2500 car for sale in developing worlds; it’s a small, two-cylinder car that gets 55 miles per gallon and meets all of India’s vehicle emissions and regulatory requirements.
Yesterday you heard the stories of five innovators, so today I thought we would look at some of the things that have been said about innovation and by innovators.
Today’s post will be relatively short, because I want you to take time to read a NY Times article called 
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