Just as innovation-focused restaurants have realised it is better to structure reinvention in a different way to repetition, established companies must empower different teams to manage and conduct reinvention efforts within their organisations. Once they have stumbled upon a successful product, then they can transfer it to an execution team to perfect, refine and replicate. These are different modes of being, thinking and measuring.
The Uncertainty Mindset with Vaughn Tan changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways.
Nonetheless, it takes a lot of courage to go against the grain, to paddle one’s own canoe, to resist conformity. The irony is that the progress of humankind depends on those people who resist conformity who embrace what Rollo May called creative courage.
Our guest is Greg Orme. His book The Human Edge, how curiosity and creativity are your superpowers in the digital economy won Business Book of the year in 2020. He explores the skills you need to survive and thrive in a world of smartphones and AI.
The title of Aristotle’s “Politics” literally means “the things concerning the city”. It is the origin of the modern English word politics. In the book, he tells the story of a 7th century BC tyrant named Thrasybulus. Thrasybulus asked his fellow oppressor, Periander of Corinth for advice on how he should govern his people. Without uttering a word, Periander walked over to a grove of poppies and lopped off their flowering heads. The message was clear “do away with eminent citizens” and “don’t let them grow above their station.” This is (one of) the origins of the term Tall Poppy Syndrome. Tall Poppy Syndrome refers to the mindset where those people who stick their head above the parapet are resented, criticized, and cut down.
Disagreement is painful. Burns’ work suggests that not only are our brains not wired for truly independent thought, but it takes a huge amount of effort to overcome the fear of standing up for one’s own beliefs and speaking out. Those people who speak up with the intention to course correct the business before a calamity should be welcomed, but they are often ostracised and outcast.
Today’s book is a clarion call for an entirely new conversation about our relationship with risk and uncertainty. Our guest examines why it’s so important to understand your risk fingerprint and how to make your risk relationship work better in business, life, and the world.
She shares insights, practical tools, and proven strategies that will help you to understand what makes you who you are –and, in turn, to make better choices, both big and small.
We welcome friend of the Innovation Show and author of You Are What You Risk, Michele Wucker, welcome back to the show
I am preparing a workshop for a client designed for a group of newly minted leaders. I want to demonstrate the differences between leaders and managers. However, I also want to highlight that being a leader and manager is also contextual, in certain cases we need to be more “managerial” (or theory X) in our approach while in other scenarios, we need to exercise our leadership skills (theory Y). Beyond these contextual situations, we must be aware that we manage things, but we lead people. Furthermore, when we operate in a world where both the problem and solution are known, management is useful. However, when we live in an unpredictable world, our inner leader must emerge.
We have the real pleasure of exploring what it was like trying to innovate from within Kodak with none other than the Inventor of the Digital Camera – Steve Sasson.We discuss so many aspects of Innovation and the struggle to let go of a successful business model.
What is cramming in Innovation? Suez Crammed Canal Effect: Cramming Old Tools into a New World