Innovation, Leadership and "Street Sense"
I know it has been a long time…
Google, as I understand, is brutal on us bloggers that do not keep up their blogging activity, so I guess search result may not be picking this up until I get going again.
Time to catch up.
In any case, I wanted to pick up on the theme from my last entry. That is, that nothing will forever by static and everything is becoming furiously dynamic.
Witness the incredible pace of change and how fast things are happening. Witness how quickly wild capital can collapse economies and event countries. Witness how quickly the greed-based subprime mess/contagion is collapsing industries and how quickly old, stale, static leadership is being proven wrong, false, cruel and in the end- hyper-irresponsible.
Exhibit one: GM. This albatross is where it is partly due to shockingly bad leadership totally devoid of foresight. It does not take a genius (or maybe it does) to figure out that GM was too big, had too many brands and had leadership unwilling to make the tough choices. Witness the Hummer brand; need we say more?
Given the furious pace of change, one thing that all of us in Innovation need to be aware of is the “now future”. I call it the now future, because glances of what the future will be are all around us if we take the time to listen and take note. We need to be totally ON and aware of trends as we build and evolve products on a daily basis.
The interesting thing is that the pace of change and technology is moving so fast that it is changing us, further accelerating developments. I have talked about his before extensively and have given presentations on this issue. We have to get better at sensing this now future and here is another thought that perhaps can help get us there.
We need to teach our executives and leaders “street sense.” This idea arose from a coffee grab I had with a bunch of international colleagues that were brought up abroad and that had very varied backgrounds and experiences. They had this “street sense” and were commenting on the fact that there seems to be a lack of this quality in American business cultures.
So, this got me thinking of course.
At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing I have been told that I have “good” street sense (what “good” means is subject to definition but let us leave this aside for now and please flow with me on this). So I started looking for answers and I think the answer may lie on our backgrounds. In my case, I was raised in four different “social cultures” (Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and USA) and four different business cultures (American, British, German and Latin American).
Having this multiplicity of exposures, I surmise, gives our brains multiple experiences that are basically stored in our minds not as active memories, but as latent memories always serving as a check to whatever event is presented to us. ( I would love to partner with brain researchers on this in order to prove the theor empirically.)
So, the huge challenge then is how to package this insight to teach our emerging leaders? We can try the approach used in the movie Matrix, but we are not quite there yet where we can upload new learnings via a port in the back of our heads.
I have said many times that immersive travel is one answer. Immersive travel is very, very unique but most people are scared by the prospects. Another trick is participating in improvisational workshops; I have done a couple of these and they really work in waking the mind and presenting it with new dimensions.
While I think of other ways to accomplish this, I invite you to think about it as well...
Google, as I understand, is brutal on us bloggers that do not keep up their blogging activity, so I guess search result may not be picking this up until I get going again.
Time to catch up.
In any case, I wanted to pick up on the theme from my last entry. That is, that nothing will forever by static and everything is becoming furiously dynamic.
Witness the incredible pace of change and how fast things are happening. Witness how quickly wild capital can collapse economies and event countries. Witness how quickly the greed-based subprime mess/contagion is collapsing industries and how quickly old, stale, static leadership is being proven wrong, false, cruel and in the end- hyper-irresponsible.
Exhibit one: GM. This albatross is where it is partly due to shockingly bad leadership totally devoid of foresight. It does not take a genius (or maybe it does) to figure out that GM was too big, had too many brands and had leadership unwilling to make the tough choices. Witness the Hummer brand; need we say more?
Given the furious pace of change, one thing that all of us in Innovation need to be aware of is the “now future”. I call it the now future, because glances of what the future will be are all around us if we take the time to listen and take note. We need to be totally ON and aware of trends as we build and evolve products on a daily basis.
The interesting thing is that the pace of change and technology is moving so fast that it is changing us, further accelerating developments. I have talked about his before extensively and have given presentations on this issue. We have to get better at sensing this now future and here is another thought that perhaps can help get us there.
We need to teach our executives and leaders “street sense.” This idea arose from a coffee grab I had with a bunch of international colleagues that were brought up abroad and that had very varied backgrounds and experiences. They had this “street sense” and were commenting on the fact that there seems to be a lack of this quality in American business cultures.
So, this got me thinking of course.
At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing I have been told that I have “good” street sense (what “good” means is subject to definition but let us leave this aside for now and please flow with me on this). So I started looking for answers and I think the answer may lie on our backgrounds. In my case, I was raised in four different “social cultures” (Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and USA) and four different business cultures (American, British, German and Latin American).
Having this multiplicity of exposures, I surmise, gives our brains multiple experiences that are basically stored in our minds not as active memories, but as latent memories always serving as a check to whatever event is presented to us. ( I would love to partner with brain researchers on this in order to prove the theor empirically.)
So, the huge challenge then is how to package this insight to teach our emerging leaders? We can try the approach used in the movie Matrix, but we are not quite there yet where we can upload new learnings via a port in the back of our heads.
I have said many times that immersive travel is one answer. Immersive travel is very, very unique but most people are scared by the prospects. Another trick is participating in improvisational workshops; I have done a couple of these and they really work in waking the mind and presenting it with new dimensions.
While I think of other ways to accomplish this, I invite you to think about it as well...
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