Welcome to Conspire’s Fun Friday Links, a weekly collection of interesting discoveries from around the Web. Most of the time, the goal is to get you thinking differently about innovation, collaboration, business culture, and life in general. Other times, we may toss an infographic or fun video your way. Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.
Welcome to the Failure Age!
The rise and fall of today’s businesses is unprecedentedly rapid. New apps, services, and solutions come and go at an intense pace, constantly being founded, funded, and finished before they even have a chance to make waves. But according to quite a few people, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it could be a critical component of innovation. From the New York Times:
“For decades, entrepreneurs and digital gurus of various repute have referred to this era, in a breathlessness bordering on proselytizing, as the age of innovation. But Weird Stuff is a reminder of another, unexpected truth about innovation: It is, by necessity, inextricably linked with failure. The path to any success is lined with disasters. Most of the products that do make it out of the lab fail spectacularly once they hit the market. Even successful products will ultimately fail when a better idea comes along. (One of Schuetz’s most remarkable finds is a portable eight-track player.) And those lucky innovations that are truly triumphant, the ones that transform markets and industries, create widespread failure among their competition.”
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How To Unleash The Power Of The Alpha Bear In Business
Being that the working world isn’t all that different from the wilderness — it’s dangerous, unpredictable, filled with myriad types of creatures, and often difficult to navigate — it’s not the worst idea to mimic the behavior of those animals who’ve managed to rise to the top of the food chain. From Forbes:
“Great leaders tap similar traits in themselves. Research by Russell Reynolds Associates found that CEOs are more willing than other leaders to take calculated risks — and have a greater bias to action.
When in a fight, bears don’t wait to pounce — nor should you. Eyeball data on your business over a few weeks or a month. Is it consistent? Then start looking at scaling—before your competitor sneaks up and tears you in shreds.
Once a week find time to dig deep on weak parts of your business — whether in compliance or leadership gaps — and make a plan to tackle them so they don’t slow you down.”
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[INFOGRAPHIC] The Social Intrapreneur’s DNA
One of the most difficult things to do in an organization is develop internal advocates. It may have nothing at all to do with how passionate employees are about the product, how creative the culture is, or how great everyone is at their jobs — often, it’s rooted in a lack of communication and direction. However, once you get a solid few “intrapreneurs” established, the domino effect is likely to kick. This infographic (excerpt below) from the Social Intrapreneur Profile demonstrates how.
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