Innovating doesn’t look like we think it does
Signals
In this issue:
Business should be more like gov….wait….
The secret of companies that last for decades
Refugees FTW
Would you know innovation if you saw it?
The evidence in front of me would seem to indicate that we wouldn’t.
Conventional innovation content follows a mind numbingly small set of story lines. We have The Genius a la Edison, who supposedly created new ideas out of thin air (ignoring the teams of craftspeople, like Lewis Latimer, who made crucial discoveries and turned them into products). We have The Grind story, like Brian Chesky of AirBnB, with his months of couch surfing. And we have a few cautionary tales of success gone awry, Elon Musk being the most recent of those.
The message we get: innovation is something that takes superhuman capabilities. Magic-level skill. The risk of flying too close to the sun.
But that’s not true.
Innovations often come from the places, and people, that our conventional story lines completely overlook. Latimer, who first figured out how to generate electricity, was a Black American in a time when people like him were widely assumed to be subhuman.
Can innovation come from refugees? From dusty old family businesses? From - urk – government people?
Yes. And more.
Our innovation story lines do more damage than just inaccurate history lessons. They teach us that They… We… Me…. cannot be innovators, unless we come from the right people and have the right speaking style and the right people in our address book.
That has never been less true. And this has never been truer: the unexpected innovators are the ones we need innovating the most.
This is the Future Here Now Signals post that free subscribers get per week. Change Maker (paid) subscribers get two doses of Signals, plus an open Office Hours where you can ask anything, plus the Change Maker’s Workbook that helps you make sense of the deep changes and how you can deal with them in your life, your work and your community.
That’s a lot of benefit for five bucks a month!
So what are you waiting for?
Business more like … government?
After 40 years of drumbeating about the lazy, bloated bureaucracy, we’re used to hearing that the other way around. Despite the current political bluster, however, it looks like that’s starting to change. Consider these quotes from this brief article:
At their best, government actions are carefully researched, broadly vetted, and deliberately implemented. This approach wouldn’t work in every business setting, but it could certainly help prevent many bad decisions and unintended consequences.
I found government workers to be knowledgeable, hard-working, and committed to serving the public. Businesses would certainly benefit if they could generate that kind of loyalty and passion in their workers.
One of my common Future Readiness refrains focuses on the seismic shift in where value lies – front line people in any sector, whose jobs used to depend on blindly following rules, discover today that they are expected to generate innovations themselves. That requires a level of shared mission between employed and employer, but if my job as an employee is simply to put money in my employer’s pocket, then we don’t have much of a shared mission, which is why so many corporations tie themselves into knots to convince employees that they are part of Something Bigger (that is, bigger than numbers on a stock ticker).
For government employees, it’s clear what the ultimate purpose of their work is. And new government employees over the last two generations have tended to intentionally choose to be part of that Something Bigger.
So it stands to reason that governments at all levels have the potential – with the right structure and support, which is not a given – to create innovations that the private sector might not be able to match.
Company that lasts decades have this
Yeah, I wasn’t suspecting that either.
Another stereotype we often get fed is the idea that family owned businesses are these stodgy dusty things living off another generation’s creation. The truth is farther than ever from that. And in almost any business, you don’t survive without being able to grow and change and make something new.
Refugees run it – and it thrives
The current animosity toward immigrants coming from certain quarters of the U.S. and elsewhere is not only ugly, it’s stupid. Throughout the history of the United States and other nations that have had similar levels of immigration, refugees have been among the most resilient, most entrepreneurial and most hardworking of anyone.
So this story from Vienna was hardly surprising to me. But maybe it will be to you.