Stimulating Innovation in your Organization
Decent manifesto on stimulating innovation inside the organization. A few specific nuggets I took away:
- Watch out for a culture of ‘yeah but…’ instead of the more desirable ‘what if…?’
- There is no question that limited resources can stifle innovation, but all too often this becomes an easy and convenient excuse for not doing the critical and creative thinking required to push to the next level—the place where elegance is found. Do people in your organization see limitations as invitations to ingenuity and opportunities to differentiate or excuses for why it can’t be done?
- People don’t lay down their lives for a job. They don’t give the totality of who they are to line shareholder’s pockets. But, they will give everything they’ve got to play a role in changing the world.
- The fact is, you can’t innovate without experimenting and you can’t experiment without making some mistakes….By giving people permission to fail, gutsy leaders give them permission to try new things. When was the last time you rewarded someone for an intelligent failure?
I particularly like the idea of an "Intelligent Failure" award where colleagues nominate and award each other for stepping out and trying a smart experiment that failed and what was learned from it.
