1. From "3 Big Rules of Innovation From The Google Guy Behind Android and Chrome" .
Creativity is an emergent process. Instead of being commanded into existence, it needs to be courted, like its sibling, serendipity.
"Creativity can be allocated, it can be budgeted, it can be measured, it can be tracked and encouraged," Rosenberg says, "but it can't be dictated."
Encourage all of em
It's tempting to kill off ideas--might be an outgrowth of our distrust of self-proclaimed visionaries. But rather than tamping down what you take to be the wrong answers, Rosenberg emphasizes that if given enough openness, the best ideas will win out.He explains:
“In a Darwinian process for weeding out the bad ideas, you will do best by encouraging all of them. The best will win and the others will fail. Thomas Edison said, ‘To have a great idea, have a lot of them.’”We've realized similar things about dealing well with criticism: The point is to expand, diversify, and ground the ideas themselves, not the egos that they spring from.
Yes: a cure for antibodies
To give us reason for optimism, Rosenberg invokes the Innovators' Dilemma--the all-to-familiar trend of organizations hardening against new thinking as they get bigger and bigger."Organizations develop antibodies to change," he says. "That's why big companies stop innovating. If you're the innovator, you're like a virus. The antibodies want to kill you."
The role of the leader, then, is to inoculate against that autoimmune crisis: by saying yes, yes, and yes--and in so doing, keeping the momentum of the organization growing.
2. From "The Undermining Myth of The "Idea Guy":
An idea does not make a visionary
Rather than being committed to a specific idea, Cooper and Vlaskovits say, the visionary is committed to "relentless change," the painful process of propelling the idea forward.That guy named Steve Jobs knows the difference--just look at his lost tapes. At first, Jobs didn't want to open up the App Store to third-party developers for fear of "polluting" Apple's pristine first-party ecosystem--that is until his close advisors urged him otherwise, as the authors note.
Refusing to be held captive by (his own) bad ideas, he altered his vision to capture the best of both worlds, retaining control of iPhone apps with a strict app approval process while allowing third party apps to flourish.The lesson, then, is this: Being that the future hasn't happened yet, no idea is too complete to change or too incomplete to start on.
"Pursue the change," Cooper and Vlaskovits conclude, "not the idea itself."
Both articles by Drake Baer.
