Innovation
I had the privilege of hearing Larry Keeley, Co-founder of Doblin, the innovation strategy firm, at the GCB Innovation Round Table last night. He painted a vivid picture of the white water global economy in which we find ourselves as a context for his talk on innovation. In brief, the degree of uncertainty and change has created a “nervous time” for corporate executives. The pace of change is probably unprecedented in the experience of the human race (my take on this below). He implied that the anxiety around terrorism is amplifying this underlying general nervousness:
We face a high degree of ambiguity on political, economic and societal levels. People hate ambiguity. Complexity has two meanings: things are difficult to understand and we cannot know the outcome of our actions (because there are too many inter-related concepts, dependencies and data for us to comprehend). People find this overwhelming. Volatility of markets; Wall Street (fill in the blank for other markets) punishes executives for vagaries in the numbers, which has led to a legendary “make the numbers at any cost” attitude. People find this mystifying and unsettling because it constantly produces nonsensical behavior.
If we define innovation as measured risk-taking and […]
