A firestorm of thought? (Photo via NMK)
I definitely like Bill Taylor’s recent article on innovation and leadership. Why? There were 2 big points that I got from the article – innovation’s reality and freedom’s vitality.
Innovation
Real change, real innovation happens unpredictably and in an improvised way (i.e. jury rigged). It happens from the ground up and you can’t plan it, control it or predict it.
Real Business Geniuses Don’t Pretend To Know Everything – Bill Taylor – HarvardBusiness.org: “Keith Sawyer, a creativity guru at Washington University in St. Louis, has literally written the book on where good ideas come from. In Group Genius, he explains how few leaders are prepared to recognize the messy and hard-to-manage truth about the real logic of business success. Many (perhaps most) executives subscribe to what Sawyer calls script-think — ‘the tendency to think that events are more predictable than they really are.’ In fact, he says, ‘Innovation emerges from the bottom up, unpredictably and improvisationally, and it’s often only after the innovation has occurred that everyone realizes what’s happened. The paradox is that innovation can’t be planned, it can’t be predicted; it has to be allowed to emerge.’”
My take: Work really, really hard to create the conditions for change, for great ideas and for action. From personal experience I can tell you that can be tough — timing, situations, you name it. Hence the reason why you can’t really plan it though you can certainly try.
Freedom
Harriet Rubin said it best: Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.
My take: Only with the freedom to create and to control their own destiny can someone thrive in the right conditions. Take Google for example, allowing their workers to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them to unleash their creativity.
What’s it mean when these are taken together? The best ideas come from the unexpected places. And as I always say, the best way to get the good ideas or three is to have a really large pool of ideas to choose from. Leaders shouldn’t expect themselves to solve everything and neither should they try — its better to create and go with the flow.
“Create the conditions for a tsunami.” (Sunny Lam)
RESOURCES
To Be a Better Leader, Give Up Authority
{ 0 comments… add one now }