Put your ideas to work

Innovation is a marriage of creativity and ability. It is putting ideas to work. Ideas are easy and cheap: backing it with action is the challenge. Ideas are useless if they are not implemented. Ideas must be backed with action. With activity. Goethe wisely pointed out: “There’s no growth without activity.” The only ideas we’re interested in presently are the ones that meet rigorous tests of practicality. The ones that involve the right mix of risk and reward. The ones that have an economic value – that have a high potential for generating monetary profits. Innovation is predicted on the fact that life is always advancing. You need to improve, too. That’s why you’re reading this piece. There’s no standing still in life. Either you’re moving forward or you’re sliding backward. If you want to maintain leadership where you are or in what you do, you have to accept the need to continuously and persistently upgrade your standards. Let your drive for excellence permeate every area of your life. Let it permeate every area of your operations if you’re a corporate entity. Anything can be improved or made better. Anything can be made simpler. It could be made faster and cheaper. In business, work is central to success. There’s no substitute to work. The best ideas in the world cannot implement itself; someone has to. So the measure of any good idea is how easily it can be put to work for the benefit of financial reward. Peter Drucker wrote that to make the future happen requires work rather than genius. The knowledge worker is the individual with the know-how, the daring, and staying power to implement ideas. But there’s a catch. Organizations resist change. Organisations favour the status quo. This is not surprising since the purpose of organization is to achieve order – the kind of degree and conformity necessary to do a particular job. Creativity and innovation disturb that order, so that organizations tend to be inhospitable to creativity and innovation. Yet without innovation the organization would eventually perish. What to do? ROUTINIZE innovation! You simply create and sustain a culture of creative innovation from inchoation. You should make it seem as natural as breathing. Now, you ask, how do you innovate? You innovate by: imitation, finding new relationships between people, institutions, things, situations, and concepts, finding new ways of doing things cheaper, faster, more efficiently, and with the minimum conflict or hazard, making changes and using new information. You must innovate for, if otherwise, there shall be no progress. Innovation isn’t a copyright of inventors. You too, from today, can start making a difference where you are. Start by improving the quality of your thinking and feelings. Choose to think only positive, ennobling thoughts. Decide to entertain only those feelings that have the greatest capacity to lift you up. Find a bolder, easier, faster, and cheaper way of doing what you are doing. Make it easier for those that live, work and play with you. How do you as an intellectual, entrepreneur, or investor begin to apply these ideas to your situation. Very simple. If you’re an intellectual, continuously improve your skills. Upgrade your attitude. Find ways of improving your workplace relationships and becoming more valuable to all your publics. Be enthusiastic about yourself, life, and your work. Think in terms of possibilities. Be more positive. If you’re an entrepreneur in this or any other environment, you must become an inverse paranoid. The concept of the inverse paranoid is an attitude of mind in which you see every event, every situation, every circumstance, every person, every turn of event - favorable or unfavorable - as conspiring to help you fulfil your purpose. The scratch of paper on the walkway contains something that might be of interest to you. The failure of your current project is omen of a bigger deal coming along. Newspapers contain useful information you require to solve your current problem. You’re an investor? Learn, learn, learn. Then invest, and learn more. And keep investing. You’re a hero. You’re an innovator. You are successful. You have made it. Put your ideas to work. - (NT, 27 Sep 07)