Take time to innovate

WHILE SOME MAY say that being an innovator is innate. But I don’t always say yes to this. As Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton M. Christensen suggest in their book The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.

There are five skills that leaders relied on to innovate their way out of problems and into opportunities- like discovering new businesses, products and services.

The five skills are-

• Question. Ask challenging questions that take on common wisdom to create new directions.
• Observe. Watch the behavior of customers, suppliers and competitors the way an anthropologist would identify new ways of doing things.
• Network. Talk to people with different life experiences and perspectives to spark new ideas.
• Experiment. Construct interactive experiences and build prototypes to provoke unorthodox responses and gain new insights.
• Associate. Draw unexpected connections between questions, problems or ideas from unrelated fields.

“Innovative CEOs at the world’s most innovative companies spent 50 percent more of their personal time engaging these discovery skills than CEOs running run-of-the-mill companies,” the authors continue. “That translates into spending two extra months every year trying to discover what’s new and what’s next for a company.

“The great news is that we don’t have to be the CEO to get the same results. Whether in our professional or personal life, spending the time to master these five skills of disruptive innovators will pay off when we’re tasked with creating a new solution, for ourselves or for others.”

Don’t give up

Hi friends, it’s been really long time since I posted something interesting. Well, today I want to share a nice piece of information that I found in the September’s Costco Connection magazine.

Don’t give up– you all know what it means right! Yes even I do. Starting from our childhood, we have faced many obstacles and have been facing at certain steps in our life to follow our heart to do good and right things or sometimes the most passionate things we feel and our parents especially our moms used to tell us “It’s OK to fail sometimes. Learn from the failures.” Those are The words that made us what we are today. We had the most awesome childhood which led us to this successful stage.

But now-a-days, kids are different. Whenever I open the newspaper, all I could see is the pressure of competition every kid is facing today to survive in this most commercial world which is taking away their innate talents, creativity and thinking. They are afraid of failure. They don’t have mental power to take time to think about their failures and follow their heart. It’s pathetic to see how times have changed. So I thought this article will help anyone who is on the edge to change their life.

Andrew Lock, a maverick marketer and the host of a weekly WebTV show that helps small- business owners to get more done and have more fun (www.helpmybusiness.com) published a article named Don’t give up in September 2011 Costco Connection magazine.

Well Mr. Andrew summarized his article by telling us about the life of certain world famous personalities who learned from their failures to make difference in this world.

1. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because “he lacked imagination and has no good ideas.” Disney went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland. In fact, the proposed park was rejected by the city of Anaheim, California, on the grounds that it would only attract “riffraff.”

2. Thomas Edison’s teacher said he was “too stupid to learn anything.” He was fired from his first two jobs for being “nonproductive.” As an inventor, Edison made more than 1,000 unsuccessful attempts to invent the light bulb. when a reporter asked him how it felt to fail 1,000 times, Edison said that he didn’t fail all those times, but that the light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.

3. Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4 years old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was “subnormal,” and one of his teachers described him as “mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in foolish dreams.” He was expelled from school.

4. Every cartoon that Charles Schulz, creator of the comic strip Peanuts, submitted to the yearbook staff at his high school was rejected.

5. After Fred Astaire’s first screen test, the memo from the testing director of MGM, dated 1933, read, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.” Astaire kept that memo over the fireplace in his Beverly Hills home.

6. Decca Records turned down a recording contract with The Beatles with this fascinating evaluation. “We don’t like their sound. Guitar groups are on their way out.”

7. Steve Jobs was rejected twice by the two important things he felt important in his life. First, when he was born, he was rejected from adoption as the parents wanted a girl and second, he was rejected from the company he started “Apple.” But this doesn’t stop him from growing as the most innovative individual in the tech world.

These are just a few examples of the great individuals who dedicated their lives to change the world and create history. If these individuals had given up their thoughts as they were failing to succeed, there wouldn’t be a History of this world that we are proud to read and encourage our next generations to innovate, invent, create miracles.

With proper intuition, bad experiences can become great lessons for success. Never give up on your hope, be patient and always love what you do.