Innovation: The Who's Where's and How's

Here is the genesis of this insight. I was sitting in a bar with a good friend of mine last week sharing some deep and non- chronic conversation about...you know, life stuff. That day I was particularly down due to a sequence of news events from friends and their latest struggles . So, my friend - who basically plays the role of life coach for beer and food - was asking me why was it that all these latest news were getting me so down. He challenged me to find the common theme from these different bits. After thinking about it for a nano -second, the insight came as it it had been waiting there for years. All the bits of information had to do with good, talented and really intelligent people having difficulties with bad management or - if independent like some of them - with getting themselves or their businesses going. So here it is: our social systems do not do a good job of "processing" talent. The system - whatever that is - lets us down all the time: We have the wrong p...

It has been awhile since my last post. This is because that balance thing erred on the side of a lot of work for the last couple of months. Perhaps I need a ghost writer: Nah, I like the excruciating pain of putting thoughts into paper in a way that has some impact. It is tough to compete with the constant media stream hitting our brains now days, you know. In any case, here is the latest insight coming from a call I received from a friend of mine last night that was hired by a very large bank to create and run an innovation practice. She basically called to tell me that the bank was shutting the practice after about one year. I can conjecture a lot of reasons why this may have happened, starting with the "real" reasons the sponsor of the practice decided to start it in the first place. Was it a play thing for the CEO? Did he want to use it to drive others out? Did he genuinely want to create new products? Did he want to just capture new knowledge? etc... The first mistake...