martes, 26 de abril de 2016

Mauro Libi: 10 ways the most innovative entrepreneurs think differently according to Thai Nguyen

1. They constantly look for patterns.
It’s called Apophenia: the ability to perceive meaningful patterns within random data. It is a pronounced trait among innovative thinkers. Intentionally looking for patterns and drawing connections will allow you to spot potentials for innovations. The ability to "predict" or foresee a problem is highly valuable. Great innovators can see the subtle thread that produces the outlier.

2. They’re brilliantly lazy.
Bill Gates said, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” Gates could substitute “a lazy person” with “an innovative person.” Innovators will indeed find the best and easiest route to get a project done. It boils down to efficiency. Innovators live by the saying, “Work smart, not hard.” They don't just strive to create the best product, but also the best process.
  
Related: Get Your Innovation Mojo Back With These 8 Tips

3. They’re obsessive note-takers.
Your conscious mind (working memory) can only process small chunks of information at a time. With a cacophony of streaming ideas, great innovators are incessant note takers. Thomas Edison left 3,500 notebooks behind at his death. 


When Richard Branson revealed a key business tool, it wasn’t a complicated gadget, but an old fashioned notepad. He’s always seeking feedback from flight passengers and cabin crew and using that information to innovate. 

Your million-dollar idea can come from anywhere; while you’re waiting for your coffee or getting groceries. Keep a compendium of your ideas, it'll be your trail leading to gold.  

4. They preach perfection, but practice progress.
Perfectionism is seen as the bad guy. It can be crippling, but discarding it opens the door for mediocrity. Great innovators still fervently preach perfection, yet they live in the reality of progress. It's a healthy pendulum-swing between the two. They strive for the ideal and get work done in the real. Millionaire trader, Timothy Sykes says to “aim for perfection, but keep firing to make progress.”

5. They're allied with their fear.
Described as a “quirky creative genius,” founder of Kidrobot and Ello, Paul Budnitz says the key to innovation is changing your relationship with fear: 

“Every one of my successful ventures has faced bankruptcy, come close to losing key employees, or just collapsed along the way. But by welcoming fear you get the benefit of what being afraid brings -- heightened awareness, compassion for others you are working with, and an unbreakable commitment to survive at all costs.”

Fear can enable progress and innovation. When the feeling of fear arises, rather than a fight/flight response, embrace it as an advantageous adrenaline rush. 

6. They don’t wait for things to break.
You’ve heard the adage, “Why fix it if it ain’t broke?” Great innovators don’t wait for things to break; they’re constantly fixing and iterating. CEO of Selfie Stick Gear Alynah Patel says the key to staying ahead and being a pioneer in your business is to live by the mantra, “It can always be better.” 

Rather than wait for a problem and then provide a solution, great innovators find ways to ensure the problem will never even exist.

Related: Innovation Can Happen in Small But Meaningful Ways

7. They understand the creative process.
Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Implementation. Those are the four classic stages of the creative process. One of the most crucial stages, just before the eureka moment is "Incubation." Great innovators find novel ways to nurture this stage of creativity; taking long showers, going for a walk in nature, doing yoga headstands. 

Incubation requires mental disengagement. It allows for the unconscious process of synthesizing all the information you've consciously encountered. The conscious detachment results in a "marination" of ideas and then solutions coming “out of the blue.”

8. They pursue multiple streams.
Elon Musk has Tesla and Solar City. Mark Cuban has too many to name, on top of the Mavericks. It’s more than just maximizing income, a hallmark of great innovators is nurturing multiple interests. Just like the creative process, alternative interests overlap and feed off each other. Having multiple projects breaks the psychological-bottleneck and pressure of succeeding in one single venture. It will also expand your breadth of knowledge and overall business acumen.

9. They possess a healthy arrogance.
It may come across as arrogance, but successful entrepreneurs and great innovators are highly confident. When Gallup studied entrepreneurial talent they found that people with high confidence performed better in stressful situations. When others see risk, highly confident and innovative entrepreneurs see opportunity; when others see roadblocks and potential failure, they see victory. 

CEO of National Pearl, Emma Schrage says, "A key part of innovation is implementation -- it’s not the first to come up with the idea, but the first to produce it." Having a healthy arrogance helped her take action in a saturated field, and against more "competent" competition. 

10. They embrace paradoxical thinking.
Great innovators do not see the world in black and white. While many people come to "either/or" conclusions, they strive to see "both/and." When cell phones only made calls, and music devices only played music, innovators overlooked these conventional boundaries. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great American novelist said it best, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."



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martes, 19 de abril de 2016

Mauro Libi Crestani: Making Change Happen


Three Reasons Innovative Ideas Fail to Gain Traction by David Shore

If a change initiative winds up in the valley of death because it’s inconsistent with mission, vision, and value, let it die there. But many ideas fall victim to ignorance, ineptitude, or insurgence.

Ignorance. This leads us to poorly navigate the unknown. As leaders, we have to give people permission to get smarter so they have a more reliable compass. 


Ineptitude. When we have the knowledge but fail to apply it correctly, digging out of the hole is nearly impossible. If you take a wrong turn, be brave enough to ask for direction.


Insurgence. You’ve got to face the saboteurs head on and convert them. Good change management certainly involves moving stakeholders out of their comfort zone into a zone of uncertainty, but it also requires you to keep them out of the panic zone.


As a change agent, you have to be astute enough to know the difference, and persistent enough to rescue a viable idea and help haul it back up the innovation peak.

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martes, 12 de abril de 2016

Mauro Libi: What actions can you take this week, small or large, to empower others to provide innovative leadership?


Through transformational leadership you can foster creative solutions by establishing innovative platforms for employee-created ideas.

Doing this can take a shift in thinking away from management-only solutions that others implement, to seeing employees as a powerful source of innovative solutions, as well as successful implementation. Mauro Libi.

Many of the most successful organizations in the world today are finding that creating new avenues for employees to collaborate and be innovative yields possibilities for growth. Just being aware of some of what others are accomplishing can inspire your own creative work.

For example, Wells Fargo and Unilever are using technology to engage employees’ creativity in a way that almost one fifth of all enterprises now use–cloud computing and websites. They succeed by establishing platforms for brainstorming and creative worker-generated solutions. Such platforms give employees a place to contribute new ideas, source solutions, and create prototypes that can be translated into actual projects.

At Intuit (the personal finance-software developer), employees not only suggest new ideas, but also gather resources and staff needed to go to market. All this is done without management approval. The results are clearly emerging in the dozens of products and features now producing revenue.

EMC, the big data organization, hosts innovation contests where strategic problems are posed by various business units for employees to solve. Workers create solutions and give input, as well as vote online for the top ideas. Outstanding breakthroughs also come when employees team up to breathe life into some of the innovative solutions that are failing.

Transformational leadership can also provide a unique way of restructuring the organization that empowers employees to lead innovation.

At Gore, a team drives everything. In fact, if you can convince others that you have a great idea with potential, you can start a team. 

These teams form the main structural units of the company and are comprised of self-managed groups of associates who are responsible to each other. They rely on each other’s creative contribution for a project’s success and even determine each other’s compensation.

 Here are some keys to structure and principles that foster innovation at Gore:

Lines of communication are direct and responsibilities are lateral.
Information and peer review are a norm.
They have more coaches than bosses.
If you give the right people good tools and knowledge, it will bring out the best in everyone.
If you trust in individuals, they will do the right thing.
Gore’s innovative structural approach to managing and empowering employees to be creative is yielding great results. They are one of the largest private firms in the world, and reportedly one of the most profitable.

The common approach at all these organizations is an active commitment and awareness that people are not only their greatest asset, but also a treasure house of creativity and innovation.  By Jane Downes. 




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martes, 5 de abril de 2016

Mauro Libi Crestani: Business initiative and positive attitude


By Mauro Libi. You have been at a particular job for some time and you seem to be getting nowhere. You just are not advancing. You watch your co-workers advance to higher pay and advance in job position and status. This gets you upset, but is not unexpected, you just knew that you would be passed up. Why is it that you are being passed up for promotions.



Well! Maybe it is your attitude. According to new research, 97 percent of employees report that they have a Career Limiting Habit (CLH) that keeps them from achieving their potential at work. Negative attitude was listed as the fifth most common career limiting habit. According to reports, a negative attitude at work will not only prevent you from getting promotions, there is a good chance that you will get fired. Mauro Libi.

What company wants a negative person to meet their customers. Negative people have little ability to sell a product or service.  There is an old saying…..“You get out, all that you put in”? Exactly true in your Sales Attitude! If the word ‘No!’ is the main word in your vocabulary to your potential customers then do not expect your customers to come back with a resounding ‘Yes!’. It is not always apparent to the salesperson that their attitude is negative. You need to look for some signs… Have you started having difficulties in the sales game?  – Are you not meeting quotas? It could be your attitude. A negative person many times has an underling anger, will give sharp responses, will grit their teeth and scowl in brow and Passive Aggressive Behavior. Mauro Libi

Passive Aggressive is the term applied to people who respond aggressively and negatively to demands made upon them by using such passive means as procrastination, dawdling, intentional inefficiency, or deliberate forgetfulness.  Usually the person is not aware of this behavior. Mauro Libi.

Even though the person is not aware of their attitude, your buyers could sense it. Your friends and employers will more than sense it , they will know that you have these character traits. This can get you dismissed from your job. But even it if doesn’t as a salesperson, you can’t afford to give off these negative signs to your buyers and clients- you must find a way to be a positive influence upon those around you. I guarantee this will get you more sales. Mauro Libi.  

The good news, is that you can change to a positive attitude. First, you have to recognize your problem. So if your production at work takes a dive. Speak to co-workers, speak to your supervisor, speak to friends. Ask them to be honest with you – what do they see holding you back. Then assess if that is a possibility. They may be right on. Sometimes it is easier to see problems from a distance. After you recognize that the problem lies with your attitude, you can now change. Remember, you can’t change unless you truly want to! Mauro Libi.

Now we all know that changing long hard habits is not easy. Change can be a difficult thing especially if you focus on how hard it is. Instead, think of how one small change can make the world of difference. Change can be exciting, exhilarating and rejuvenating! Tell yourself that …..’I need to increase sales, having a relationship will help my attitude which in turn will make me more appealing to my customers. A good attitude will also make me more appealing to friends.’ Having a positive attitude will help you both in business and in your personal life.  Mauro Libi.


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