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.
Innovation Takes the Exponential Express
One of the biggest questions out there today on the minds of business leaders is not just about how to get innovating — it’s about how to do it most effectively, at scale, and in a way that’s both repeatable and profitable. But without a fundamental understanding of how the process works and what, exactly, is necessary to make it successful time and time again, running head-first into the innovation race might be nothing more than a mistake. From Wired Insights:
“We’re all familiar with Moore’s Law: the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. We’re also familiar with the plethora of corollaries to the law, pertaining to everything from network speed to hard drive capacity to the number of pixels in our digital cameras. It seems that the natural behavior for technology advancement follows an exponential growth curve.
However, not all innovation follows such a curve. Organizational and process improvements, in particular, seem to proceed at a glacial pace. Management fads come and go, and they don’t even seem to be getting much better, let alone better at a faster rate.
In development shops, the Agile Manifesto is now fifteen years old or so, and yet organizations still struggle with it. Where’s Moore’s Law when you need it, eh?
The problem today’s organizations face is that digital transformation relies both upon technology advancement as well as organizational innovation – and yet, it seems our inability to accelerate the latter may be putting the whole kit and caboodle in jeopardy.”
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3 Secrets from a Chess Master Who Built One of the Fastest-Growing Companies in the U.S.
If you’ve ever played or watched someone play chess, it’s pretty clear that it’s a game built around careful strategy and extremely thoughtful consideration of actions and possibilities. Those who master the game do it through patience, diligence, determination, and with a little luck, against an inferior opponent. And, in many ways, how a skilled player approaches chess can teach us a lot about how to approach business, too. From Inc.:
“Inexperienced chess players will jump at the opportunity to take an opponent’s pawn pretty much instantly, according to Manion. They’ll stop their search for a move because they’ve located one. In business, make sure that you’re looking at the whole landscape and actually picking based on the complete set of information, not just the first thing that comes across your plate that looks good.”
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The Dark Side of Creativity
Creativity has always gone hand in hand with the more obscure aspects of human nature, but all in the name of building something better. Yet, this long-standing assumption could be responsible for more than just a little out-of-box thinking; it can, in fact, cause some pretty shady behavior. But is that necessarily a bad thing? From The Week:
“My research demonstrates that a dark side of creativity can surface in people who aren’t objectively creative, but simply think that they are. For example, people who view themselves as creative can develop a sense of entitlement — the belief that they’re more deserving than others. They view their ideas as unique, novel, and important, and, as a result, think they are entitled to either act in a certain way, or be rewarded for their efforts. For example, they may view stealing as a justified means of claiming something that they feel they deserve.”
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