Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 9

When it comes to health care reform, innovation will matter more than politics

With all the talk of reforming health care, what if we are missing the bigger picture?

What if all this emotional debate about whether to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, was a waste of time?

In 2013, I was asked to give a TED Talk in Washington, D.C. to coincide with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. I was to follow the Surgeon General; the Director of the National Institutes of Health; and a well-known Harvard Business School professor, among others.

I immediately said, “No thanks!” I didn’t want to be like Frank Gorshin, the impersonator who came on the Ed Sullivan Show right after the Beatles made their American debut. After some cajoling, I agreed to do the event with the stipulation that I could invite a panel of health care innovators and pretend to be Oprah.

Surprisingly, they agreed.

Top innovators from Google, AT&T, Lockheed Martin, and Qualcomm joined me in a very pleasant, non-confrontational discussion about how health care was being changed from the outside in.

We discussed the use of smart phones to perform physical exams in record time for less than $15, diagnosis of diseases like river blindness with the addition of a cheap lens attachment for handheld devices, crowdfunding the discoveries of new drugs, and using open-source informatics to create inexpensive and customized therapies, and more.

In the weeks that followed, I received a few polite but passive-aggressive emails from people I took to be seasoned physicians. The message was usually the same. “You don’t understand how we do things because you are not a doctor.”

I also received several emails from medical students and residents. Their messages went something like this: “The attending physicians in my medical center are terrified of new technology, please send help.”

Finally, I received numerous inquiries from young entrepreneurs who wanted to be outside-in innovators themselves. Most of them were looking for moral support, industry connections, and large amounts of cash.

It was clear that all three groups belonged to the same health care ecosystem but with much more eco and much less system.

What has been conspicuously absent from the discussion about reforming health care is the role innovation is playing in making it better, faster and cheaper. While we are lobbying and legislating the future of health care in America, innovators are creating the products and services that will largely determine what that future looks like.

Ideally, doctors would be leading the effort, but they are falling behind the pace of the innovators. The irony is that health care is great at developing timely new therapies but terrible at operationalizing them. It’s a difficult balancing act. We expect our physicians to follow the rules so that we get predictable results. But if we don’t give them room to try new things, innovators will come from somewhere else.

Over the past few years I’ve been working with some of the leading medical institutions to teach students and physicians how to make innovation happen from the outside-in. The results have been promising so far, but there is much more to do before we see any real impact on the availability and affordability of health care. Its future will obviously be affected by the decisions of our elected representatives – but the ideas coming from these outside-innovators may matter more in the end.

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation: professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. Connect with Jeff on Twitter @JeffDeGraff.

This article was originally published on The Next Idea

Americans now see the truth as relative. What comes next?

Thirty years ago, University of Chicago Professor Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind. The book deconstructed higher education’s failure to prepare students with the knowledge necessary to lead enlightened lives. Bloom’s emphasis on reading the Great Books was met with adulation by conservatives, who viewed it as a declaration of traditional values, and with condemnation by progressives who thought the work was a perpetuation of social class inequities.

What started as a discussion about “what every educated person should know” ended in a contentious debate about the virtues of meritocracy versus democracy, as if the two ideas were mutually exclusive. When I was a junior professor, I was certain that Dr. Bloom was just another misguided old classicist. These days, however, I’m beginning to wonder if he may have been right all along.

In any age, ideas are assembled, disassembled and reassembled according to their usefulness and whoever has the power to move them. For example, what the founding fathers considered inclusive would now exclude over half of our current population. So, over time, ideas get updated, like versions of a computer program. Each version is an extension or a complete reimagining of the previous one.

Innovation is built upon ideas of every hue – old, new, strange, obscure. They never seem to fit at first but with time, and a little luck, these ideas may actually hold up while the rest of our world shifts and shakes. Professor Bloom cautioned that cultural relativism would have us mistake the teetering edges for the unmoved middle. He saw Plato, Marx and Freud as the compulsory bedrock upon which more advanced ideas could be balanced by an independent mind.

What I think Dr. Bloom was getting at was is that it’s not about political doublespeak, spin doctors, or fake news. It is about the closing of the American mind. We no longer collectively possess the ideas, the range of lenses, or the apparatus to think clearly, freely and independently. The constructive conflict of classroom debate was replaced by safe spaces and trigger warnings, and with it went the courage to confront the mediocrity of second-rate ideas. Ironically, this has left us without the ability to rightly judge fact from fiction. Bloom predicted that there would come a day when many Americans saw the truth as relative. That day is here.

We have always had people who use ideas to swindle and deceive. But there have also been those among us who are not so easily fooled. They think deeply. They connect the dots. They recognize the patterns. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see these people and even harder to hear them.

So let’s start looking for the next idea by asking a few questions to those who actually know about the last idea:

Where have we seen an idea like this before?

When has this idea been tested?

How will this idea actually work?

Who is proposing this idea?

Why are they trying to advance this idea?

What are some alternatives to this idea?

Like Professor Bloom, I too believe that great ideas, like people, are works in progress. Perhaps the first step to uniting our divided nation is to reestablish a common ground. It may be that we need to retrace some of our past – to revisit the great thinkers – before we can reopen our minds and recommit ourselves to finding a way forward – together.

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation: professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. Connect with Jeff on Twitter @JeffDeGraff.

This article was originally published on The Next Idea

Some games are over after one win or loss. Democracy is not that kind of game.

It’s said necessity is indeed the mother of invention. Innovation is often born out of crisis or conflict – a war, a pandemic or a financial crash.  Sometimes the conflict can be constructive, like the invention of a new miracle drug. And sometimes the conflict can be destructive, like, for instance, a contentious election.

Recently, I was being driven from one client site to another across a southern state. My driver was an affable older fellow named Buster. On the radio, we heard a report about how thousands of young protesters had blocked the streets of Los Angeles. In rather colorful language, Buster said that the election was over and these people needed to get on with their lives. I responded that the election was over, but surely the conflict wasn’t.

He asked me what I meant, so I gave him an analogy. There are two types of games – finite and infinite. Finite games have winners and losers, rules, and time limits, like football and chess. But infinite games don’t have winners or losers, agreed-upon boundaries or clear endings. The central idea of the game is to keep playing it. Think about how skateboarders challenge each other with maneuvers of ever-increasing difficulty. There are no clear winners and losers, only the understanding that tomorrow they’ll be back at the skate park to have another go.

Obviously, elections are far more than a game, but the analogy works. So, I asked Buster, what would happen if he thought the election was over – a finite game – while those young protesters didn’t share his opinion, considered it an infinite game, and kept playing. He responded that they would probably create mischief like hacking web sites, leaking confidential data and maybe even trying to game the next election. I asked him whom these young protesters wanted as their president. He said, “That socialist Bernie or maybe somebody worse.”

It was becoming clear that we were at different ends of the political spectrum, but we were careful to keep the conversation amicable for the long drive. We talked about our families and the challenges of fatherhood. We discussed the galvanizing events of our lives as Baby Boomers – the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, Watergate, 9/11. These moments focused our generation. They brought us together. They created the necessity for us to do things in a different and new way, for better or for worse.

I asked Buster if this election might be, in fact, a galvanizing event for these young protesters. He gave it some thought, said he didn’t know and looked concerned. We left it there and kept the conversation to fishing and football the rest of the way.

In 2015, there was a subtle change in our democracy. For the first time in almost a century, Baby Boomers stopped being the voting majority. Now it’s the Millennials, those who reached young adulthood around the year 2000. With time, this gap will get larger. Thus far, the crises of this younger generation have mostly not been event driven. Rather, they’re ongoing challenges – crushing student debt, high housing prices, finding healthcare coverage and getting jobs. This slope of downward mobility has been slow and almost imperceptible.

The last time an American generation responded to a slow-moving crisis, the result was the New Deal of the 1930s – a complete reworking of our political and economic system. Many of these social innovations are still with us, like social security, federal deposit insurance and unemployment insurance. But it’s possible that this election could become the Millennials’ turning event; the first real crisis of their generation that brings them together. Now, of course, there are diverse voices in each generation.

The other question is which side Generation X will take – the boomers or the millennials. Those born between 1960 and the early 1970s are the smallest generation America has ever produced. But as the Boomers fade, it’s Generation X that will tip the scales of the next few elections. They are the ambassadors, translators and emissaries of the generational culture wars. They will decide whether the changes and innovations will be constructive or destructive.

Neither Buster nor I know how this game plays out. What I do know is that the game goes on and how we win in one round will often determine how we lose in the next. Let’s hope that all sides take the long view of this infinite game we call democracy.

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation: professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. Connect with Jeff on Twitter @JeffDeGraff.

This article was originally published on The Next Idea

Rethinking the Liberal Arts for Business Education: Rise of the ‘Pracademic’

In a world of open access, higher education remains astonishingly, frustratingly closed. Our universities are insurmountable barriers rather than the points of universal entry that they should be. This was the powerful point of a compelling Economist cover story last year, “America’s New Aristocracy.” The essay argues that college in the U.S. has become a class distinction, a marker of privilege, not unlike the way it was traditionally in England.

Nowhere is this more evident these days than in America’s top business schools, where prosperity is promised to all, but the hierarchy of class is perpetuated and routinely reinforced through the selection of students and faculty by conventional means from traditional places, the adherence to a single-minded vocational curriculum, and the exclusivity of insiders who graduate from the closed confines of the classroom to those of the board room.

And yet, in no other discipline are graduates better positioned to create an immediate, tangible change to society. Through socially responsible perspectives, collaborative problem-solving, and practical and continued learning, the air of privilege and the stink of elitism in business education can be extinguished. But to achieve this more egalitarian society, existing models of delivering business education need to be dismantled.

While our students collaborate in a wider, more fluid horizontal world—boundaryless, diverse, and technologized—we remain vertically institutional no matter what we may profess. It may be time to change the way business schools do business.

That’s where a liberal arts approach to education comes in. It has the potential to enact great structural changes in the way young people from all backgrounds learn about and participate in the larger world.

Developed in ninth-century Europe—though some claim it first appeared either earlier or later—the liberal arts curriculum originally had two main areas of instruction: the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). The goal was to cultivate a particular quality of mind, to impart in the student a wider worldview. This is especially relevant to our own world of rapid and constant change, but in medieval Europe, the aim was to preserve things the way they were, to keep everyone in their social order. Thus the liberal arts curriculum was taught exclusively in Latin, the language of the gentry.

It wasn’t really until around a hundred years ago that the liberal arts curriculum began to stop perpetuating privilege and started emphasizing more forward-thinking forms of knowledge. This is the revolution that John Dewey launched with the 20th-century Progressive Education movement. He believed in a “See One, Do One, Teach One” approach to learning, where student apprentices received a hands-on education and then went on to teach future generations with the same approach. This model persists today in medical education, which requires that young doctors train by working alongside their experienced elders. Remarkably, this is a relatively new development in business education, even though it is essentially a vocational area of study.

Dewey re-imagined the liberal arts curriculum as a foundation for the professions, a way of giving us better teachers, engineers, specialists of all kinds. A pure extension of pragmatism, this mode of education celebrated the cash value of ideas: the better an idea, the bigger value it has in the real world. To this end, Dewey wanted his new learning system to produce a great middle class of socially responsible, well-informed citizens with common values. At a moment when everyone talked of the Rise of the American Century, the middle class was to be the foundation of all intelligence and productivity.

A century later, liberal arts education has undergone yet another transformation. In many ways, it’s a good change: today’s liberal arts curricula embrace both the social responsibility of Dewey and the wide worldview of Trivium and Quadrivium. But the downside is that, as Columbia professor Andrew Delbanaco tells us in the 2014 documentary, Ivory Tower, today’s youth are underprepared for the responsibilities of adult life, and college does little to help. The film ultimately suggests that universities have become a playground.

With a liberal arts approach to education increasingly out of reach for business students, it’s time to rethink not only the business school curriculum itself but also the way we teach it—and who does the teaching. Here are three things our institutions can do to re-invigorate liberal arts into business education at this critical moment.

Drop the “one and done” model. Let’s try developing curricula that work like Legos, each individual component a small piece that we can re-combine within the larger system to produce an infinite number of creations. This will provide teachers with new tools and opportunities to open up their pedagogy to respond in real time to the concerns and demands of the outside world. It will also allow for more cross-disciplinary collaboration and experimentation. In promoting this model of perpetual growth, we need to incorporate continuing education—ongoing certifications and opportunities for students, teachers, and professionals to update old expertise—so that learning carries on beyond the classroom.

Flip the classroom. Forget Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). The real innovation in learning is happening at the Khan Academy. Whereas MOOCs—including TED, Coursera, and edX—reproduce tired models of knowledge transmission with talking heads delivering lectures to a questionably captive audience, the Khan Academy represents a radical change in the way we imagine the classroom. In this model, students receive the primary course material to read through and learn before coming to class. This way, during actual class time, the instructor can work with the students in applying the shared concepts to real situations. This flipped-classroom approach is essentially applied liberal arts: the high-mindedness of Trivium and Quadrivium meets the practicality of John Dewey.

Put faculty insiders on the outside and outsiders on the inside. The best teachers have had meaningful experiences related to their field of study out in the real world. We need practitioners in the classroom. Conversely, we need the expertise of teachers and researchers in industry organizations. Let’s cultivate professors who are also professionals and professionals who are also professors. Some people call this kind of Renaissance person the “pracademic” (the practical academic). The idea is that those who create and teach knowledge should also be practitioners of it. Seeking out and nurturing pracademics will better bring together universities and their immediate communities. Through initiatives like Collaborative Open Innovation Networks (COINs), professors can make new connections with unlikely intellectual partners as they move in, across, and outside of the academy.

The liberal arts curriculum is not a fixed set of universal ideas but an ever-changing model of approaching our world’s most important issues as the issues themselves evolve. The more fluid we are with our teaching, the more open-minded and diverse our students will become. It’s an imperative not only for instructors and business school administrators but also for public officials and parents—for all of us. Let’s start by integrating the practical and the academic in business education. The semester is already—indeed, always—under way. Let’s get to work.

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation: professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. Connect with Jeff on Twitter @JeffDeGraff.

This article was originally published on BizEd.

Making Innovation Happen in the Most Challenging Situations

Innovation is about making our world better and new. While there are some regions that are dealing with the speed and complexity of hyper-innovation, there are others that are struggling to integrate innovation in the most fundamental forms: clean water, reliable food sources, basic health care and safety from violence.

Given that most leaders will face a challenging situation where making innovation happen is difficult at best, I thought it might be helpful to interview someone who has lived with the most formidable of problems to see what lessons we can glean from their experience.

Paul Kortenhoven has been a development leader of West African Missions for over thirty years. He has worked through poverty, plagues and civil wars and now advises communities how to thrive in the face of adversity. Paul’s suggestions could apply to any community or organization. The next time you think you find it difficult to make innovation happen, you might want to consider Paul’s advice.

JEFF: Where do you start to make innovation happen in war-torn region where many are living day to day?

PAUL: First, you have to understand that you cannot help people without giving away a part of yourself. It often hurts to help-but the long term results for both the helper and “helpee”are tremendous.

Results for the helper are respect, self-confidence, understanding of who you really are and why you are where you are, happiness

Results for the “helpee” are healing, recognition, chance to improve life, seeing an example of compassion to follow which always “pays it forward” somehow and somewhere and the awareness that you are loved and you are valuable, your life counts.

JEFF: How do you establish a relationship with these communities that allows you to introduce new ideas?

PAUL: Belonging is everything. “I exist because we are!” This is the core value of the African villager. Everyone needs to belong to some unit…a family, peer group, work group in planting season…everyone belongs regardless of their status in the village….from the deaf mute to the village chief. Then, there are no losers. Only winners!

The positives of this widely held belief are overwhelming! So overwhelming that when the civil war started in Sierra Leone in 1991, the Revolutionary United Front or RUF used this value to indoctrinate their kidnapped child soldiers. The human need to belong, to be respected, to be of value was inverted completely. The RUF through force, intimidation and extreme violence demonstrated clearly that the perversion of what is good, noble and even biblical can be turned into pure evil.

Trust is key. In Sierra Leone (and most African poverty riddled countries) you simply die if you do not live in a village or an area in which people trust each other.

In literally every business, every school system, every government department, we need to figure out how to build and or re-build trust among employees and employers, the government and the people they represent, residents and the educational systems, rich and poor. It is possible if you believe it….remember the Kevin Costner movie “Field of Dreams”.

JEFF: So how do we create this Field of Dreams in the many places that need innovation the most?

PAUL: Well, maybe we should start by paying more attention to the rural areas, to the small towns. They are the soul of the state. Learn to listen to people who live and work on farms, orchards, in a small town garage, shopkeepers. The big cities and tech towns are not the center of our universe.

Then, take care of the poor who will “always be with us”. Use the existing welfare system wisely and improve it. People who need welfare really do need it. They are not all free loaders as so many of us think. And the myth of pulling yourself up by the boot straps is a just that…a myth not a fact. I know people for whom it has worked well and are now college graduates and even Ph. D’s. When they needed help, it worked for them.

The worst insult in an African village or society is to be called “tightfisted”. There are proverbs in very West African language about the sorry fate of “tightfisted “people. A good name is worth more than gold in a poor society. It isn’t just in poor societies that people need each other to survive. In the “wealthy” society we have in the US, we all need each other as well. The sooner the leaders of our greatest cities, schools, businesses and economic leaders learn this, the better off we all will be.

Be generous not parsimonious. Think about tapping the really wealthy for the sake of the poor and make it plain that we are doing this because it is the right thing to do.

JEFF: Why aren’t we doing more to make innovation happen in these places now?

PAUL: Simply put, intolerance. One of the most important lessons we learned in our international lives was to be tolerant of other cultures, other world views, other religions. If you do not tolerate other people as they are, other people will never figure out who you are and you will accomplish nothing by working among them. Find some people that you know think differently than you do and get to know them….by listening not by telling them what to do…talk with them and not to them. You will be a better leader better, a better CEO, a better worker and a better person.

We need to be inclusive not exclusive. Learn from the “movers and shakers” but do not worship them. Do not make major decisions based solely on their interest or comments. Remember that most people are not “movers and shakers” but they still need to be heard.

To at least approach some sense of democracy, be inclusive. Exclusive groups serve only themselves and “themselves” just ain’t enough to sustain anything but “themselves”….

JEFF: What is your biggest concern about our own society’s ability to develop meaningful innovations? 

PAUL: Multi-tasking! In less developed countries multi-tasking is a luxury. You have to concentrate on what is necessary for survival. In a recent NYT article, “Think less, Think better” by Moshe Bar made a lot of sense to me.

My father, a straight thinking mechanical engineer, literally took the radio out of our new 1958 Edsel because, as he said, “You cannot concentrate on your driving when are listening to the radio” And my bother in law (a vegetable farmer from Ohio) did not obey his father when told to turn off the radio while transplanting celery into the field from the green house and subsequently planted two whole rows of radishes upside down! Grandpa was not pleased to say the least.

Moshe Bar, a neuroscientist writes that a recent study by one of his Harvard graduate students “suggests that innovative thinking, not routine ideation, is our default mode when are minds are clear”. My father was right in 1958! Doing or thinking about several things simultaneously usually results in none of them being done well.

JEFF: In many ways, your suggestions about innovation are, shall we say, traditional?

PAUL: Their “newness” comes in the recognizing that the “tried and true” values past have been de-valued or discarded by the extreme individualism of our present day culture and the ease of electronic age which allows us and encourages us to be even more self-centered. This enables us to ignore our neighbor and belong only to ourselves. …bad for business, bad for any meaningful accountability for our decisions in whatever field in which we are engaged.

Once we recognize this, innovation can begin in leadership in business, education and government.

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If you’d like to be in touch with Paul Kortenhoven, I welcome you to contact him directly: pkortenhoven@gmail.com.

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation: professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. Connect with Jeff on Twitter @JeffDeGraff.

The article was originally published by The Huffington Post.

Innovating Your Way to a Good Job

If you feel like some people have no problem finding a job-even in the most difficult job markets-you’re not mistaken. These seemingly lucky individuals know something: You don’t get a job by competing in the same game as every other job searcher and applicant-you get it by innovating.

Want to learn how to innovate your way into your next career move? I’ve put together my methods in this infographic:

So, you’ve learned that becoming an innovator doesn’t mean trying to be Steve Jobs overnight. You should instead position yourself as the solver of the most difficult, tedious problems. If you can solve problems for the innovators at existing organizations, you’re on the fast track to becoming one yourself.

How to Stop Self-Sabotaging Your Creativity

It’s easier to start from scratch than it is to get out of a creative rut. That’s because we know a lot more about what sparks creativity than we do about what blocks it. The Greeks believed that inspiration came to us through muses who literally visited us. Freud insisted that creativity was a kind of sublimation, a way of dealing with repressed inclinations. Jung theorized a collective unconscious, structures of mind that all people have in common. Today, psychologists like Kay Redfield Jamison describe creativity as a mood disorder, a mild form of madness.

We have countless answers to the question of what drives people to be creative, but the better, tougher–more elusive–question is its opposite: what stops people from being innovative? Why do so many of us have trouble overcoming creative dry spells? There are, of course, tons of studies attempting to address just that, yet many of them are biased by fundamental attribution errors. That is, these theories attempt to impose orderly patterns on complex, ineffable cognitive phenomena. For example, recent reports reverse-engineer the lives of geniuses like Einstein and Edison and identify the qualities that made them creative as symptoms of disorders like dyslexia. To attribute these late visionaries’ talents to psychological conditions is to suggest something improvable and to falsely assume causality. Further, it is to give a tidy explanation for what are, in actuality, the messy realities of the human mind.

Rather than symptomizing creative blocks, I offer here three different factors that impede innovation–the inner saboteurs of creativity. We can’t destroy them completely, but we can manage them. Understanding how these saboteurs work will help us get out of that rut and avoid getting into new ones in the future.

Motivation. One of the major reasons people can’t be creative is that they’re not motivated to be creative–or their motivation is misguided. There are two types of motivation: positive and negative. Positive motivation comes from the desire to achieve tangible rewards, to impress others, or to make ourselves happy. Negative motivation comes from the wish to avoid bad consequences, to eliminate failure, or prevent self-hate or disappointment.

While positive motivation appears more encouraging than negative motivation, the truth is that negative incentives can actually be even more powerful. Creativity is, after all, often born out of constraints–not freedom. And necessity is the strongest motivating force of all: discomfort, alarm, and dissatisfaction are the starting points of many great innovations.

Figure out which motivators move you most. Pay attention to what gives you energy and what takes your energy. If you’re more creative when given soak time, allow yourself more space and time to generate ideas. If you’re more creative when given deadlines, impose a stricter timeline on yourself. Take a look at Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s influential book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, for further tools on discovering what motivates you to create.

Confidence. Self-doubt is a form of paralysis: lack of confidence shuts down our creative forces. When we’re unsure of ourselves, we can’t perform to our fullest abilities. Self-confidence is highly subjective and situational. For example, a neurosurgeon might have nerves of steel when operating on a patient’s brain, but may quake when giving a public speech. This debilitating anxiety is an evolutionary feature, a primal fear mechanism focused on what we won’t want to happen. It’s a neurobiological impulse to avoid what makes us uncomfortable. When that neurosurgeon’s hands sweat and shake at the lectern, it’s as if he’s running away from a predator. Here, our self-doubt becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because we look for confirming feedback to validate our instincts. We’re setting ourselves up for failure. We’re our own saboteur.

No one wants to be afraid, but fright can be empowering: it heightens our senses and keeps our expectations realistic. It stops us from becoming overly enthusiastic or, to use Alan Greenspan’s phrase “irrationally exuberant.” Hoping for the best and preparing for the worst is a sensible approach to innovation. Lack of confidence isn’t always a terrible thing–we just need to stop it from taking over us.

The best way to beat self-doubt is to create a sense of destiny. This is essentially faking it until you make it, or temporarily embracing delusions of grandeur. Think of it like a balancing act. If you’re being held back by anxieties about your abilities, you can make up for it by welcoming the extreme opposite: thoughts of great confidence. For example, there is some evidence that Olympic pole-vaulters who give themselves affirmations go on to clear heights that they’ve never before achieved. This is one of the things they learn to do at the Olympic camps in Colorado Springs. If building up yourself doesn’t work, simply consider the worst that can happen if you fail and put it in context. Chances are unless you’re a combat pilot or a neurosurgeon, it’s not the end of the world. Tom Kelley’s book, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All, is a great resource for people who want to develop their innovative courage.

Isolation. The lone genius is a myth perpetuated by romanticized accounts of creation. Solitude is simply not conducive to innovation. Creativity is highly interactive. At our core, we are social beings–even the most introverted of people. In his path-breaking Knowledge Trilogy–The Discovers, The Creators, The Seekers–Daniel Boorstin chronicles the great creative ensembles throughout human development. He shows us how history has brief periods of ballistic creativity in relatively small regions, like the Song Dynasty in 11th-century China and the Renaissance in 15th-century Florence. The 20th– and 21st-century equivalents are creativity clusters like Silicon Valley, the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and Tel Aviv’s Startup City.

Great ideas travel from one domain to another and spill into other ideas. This is the concept of cognitive mobility–and this is why these very concentrated areas of high creativity produce so much of the world’s intellectual property. When people with all different kinds of expertise are in close proximity of each other, they reach unexpected, cross-boundary solutions. Often the most effective solutions are intersectional and come from adjacent fields. For example, the person who came up with a way to price options was actually someone who studied the trajectory of rockets. Even though rockets and options appear to be two wildly dissimilar objects, they are both highly dynamic things that change rapidly over time, so being able to understand the movement of a rocket from one nano moment to another proved to be indispensible in understanding options.

Start making alliances with people who are unlike you but who have comparable aims. Your ideal creative ally is someone who has different capabilities and proficiencies than you but is trying to accomplish the same fundamental thing whether it’s making art, designing software, or discovering a molecule. Once you’ve built your team, it’s time to run experiments, build prototypes, and construct proofs of concept.

Understand that constructive conflict is an essential part of the creative process. The tensions you experience with and against your allies will generate the hybrid ideas you wouldn’t have reached otherwise. Pay attention to the acknowledged and hidden masters around you. Keep a journal of key new insights, so you are aware of what you’re learning as you go along and can apply these lessons at any moment. Eric Weiner’s new book, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley, is a wonderful guide to finding your creative place and to thinking about what kind of people you need to be around to achieve your innovative potential.

The saboteurs of creativity are all within our control, because they’re inside us. We’ll never be able to get rid of them completely, but we can anticipate and strategize around them, making them work for us. Alternately, we can sidle up to our saboteurs and enjoy the peace and quiet of not creating–if only in the brief moment before we’re ready to innovate again.

It’s the Talent, Stupid

Six presidential campaigns later, I’ve still got Bill Clinton’s iconic 1992 slogan running through my head: It’s the economy, stupid. But it’s not the economy that I’m thinking about–it’s corporate relocation that’s on my mind. What was so effective about Clinton’s irresistible one-liner is the way it redirected American attention. He not-so-politely told us that, when it came to diagnosing national unrest, we were getting it wrong.

Similarly, the press is missing the real issue when it comes to corporate relocations. Recent articles in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal highlight the stories of businesses moving headquarters domestically and internationally for tax concerns. While it’s certainly true that some companies are abandoning their states and the U.S. altogether to dodge taxes, the media is overstating the importance of these fiscally-motivated moves.

Much more significant are the large multinational manufacturers that are actually relocating to higher tax areas to attract the best talent and to develop a line of sight toward emerging markets and technologies. This is a very different story from the one you’ll find in the media–a story that involves some of the biggest, most stalwart American companies out there.

For example, in the early 2000s, Boeing moved from Seattle to Chicago. Part of the organization’s justification was that Chicago, with its wide array of top educational institutions, provided more opportunity to attract new talent. Last year, Cadillac moved from Detroit to New York City, which of course has a much greater tax rate. And General Electric, just this past week, moved from Fairfield, Connecticut to Boston.

The traditional argument is that lower tax rates attract the best companies. But the numbers suggest otherwise.

The states with the highest amount of venture capital per person, which is an indicator of growth potential, are California, Massachusetts, and New York. These are also among the top tier of places with the biggest state and local tax rates. So why are all these giant, multinational companies with tons of moving parts and pieces moving to these expensive locales?

It turns out that all three states are also among the very top tier of higher education rates. The people who live in these places are more likely to have graduate degrees than their peers elsewhere, and the states themselves are abundant with elite research universities and institutes. Additionally, they have diverse and multi-cultural populations with global perspectives on all issues. This is becoming especially important because these multinational companies are making more and more of their profits in countries outside of the U.S.

The trend goes beyond these three states. Forbes‘ list of the most-educated American cities are disproportionately college towns with significantly higher employment rates and far better paying jobs than the rest of their surrounding regions. While some of these jobs are associated with academic institutions, most of them are with companies that have built around these areas to get talent.

It’s an indisputable fact: organizations locate in places where top talent is readily available. People want to live in these areas because of access to culture and education. Furthermore, these spots are typically more inclusive than other locales because they’ve historically welcomed people from all over the world and embraced a multiplicity of worldviews.

The lure of great talent is so attractive to organizations that it overshadows the expense of higher taxes. But why now? Why are we suddenly seeing all these companies willing to spend more money to move?

The days of easy growth are over. Just take a look around: China is slowing down. Oil prices are falling, so the whole notion of getting rich off of a commodity doesn’t really exist anymore. And the cost of capital is increasing, which means that we’ll soon see interest rates go up dramatically. We can no longer just make profits by selling to a new region or by betting on natural resources or depending on cheap money. Innovation is now required. It’s officially the only game in town.

Innovation assets are intangible. They walk in and out the door every day with the workforce. Talent can be located anywhere. Indeed, you’ll find some of the highest-educated cities and college towns in unexpected, out-of-the-way places with extreme climates and otherwise less-than-favorable living conditions.

So how can you build up your innovation assets? Here are three strategies for bringing the best and the brightest to your front door.

Focus on education. Compulsory higher education and continuing education are crucial for building a promising talent pool. This requires increased spending: you get what you pay for. We also need to develop alternative intellectual pathways: apprenticeship, service, accreditation, and certifications. Seek out and promote hands-on experience, specialized skills, and relevant life histories to enrich and enlarge your talent. Expand the very medium by which education is transmitted. Make use of multimedia like the Khan Academy, Big Think, and TED Talks. Delivering knowledge this way greatly reduces the cost of education.

Create opportunities and incentives that attract top talent. We need to embrace both democracy and meritocracy. In the Pixar film, Ratatouille, Remy the Rat’s favorite quotation encapsulates this idea: “Anyone can cook.” It’s not until the end of the movie that Remy comes to understand the meaning of these three wonderful words: talent can come from anywhere, but it doesn’t mean that everyone is equally talented. Democracy means that everyone is given the chance and meritocracy means that, when given that chance, a few will be significantly better than all the others. Pay attention to who has talent. The other thing that will help us discover talent is putting an end to the culture wars. Talent centers are often held in contempt by the rest of the region, where leaders often enact laws simply to stifle differences, driven by xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Thus, the areas in the immediate vicinity of these talent centers come to resent the inclusivity of these intellectual and cultural hotspots. So we must launch initiatives that will bring regions together rather than pit them against each other.

Take the long view. Areas that draw top talent were established a long time ago and viewed as investments in the future. Puritans founded Harvard almost 400 years ago because they believed that, in order to be saved, you needed to read the Bible, and so it was crucial that people learned how to read. Whether it’s the University of Michigan, started in the pioneer days, or the Research Triangle formed in the 1950s, or Silicon Valley in the 1960s, the creation of talent centers requires deep foresight and the culture and capability to pull off something special. Three words come to mind here: pay it forward.

Most of us want to pay less taxes, see our investments create huge returns in the very near future, and only live with people who appreciate our work. But attracting top talent to make innovation happen isn’t about what we like–it’s about what we need, stupid.

The Conscious Company and Other Myths

The Conscious Company: it’s that buzzy piece of corporate speak we’ve all been hearing and using without really thinking about it. The irony is that we’re not conscious of what so-called company consciousness actually means.

What most organizations really mean when they call themselves “conscious” is conscientious: wishing to do what is right. There are tons of post-millennial “conscious” companies that show compassion, prioritize ethics, and give back to communities. Consider, for example, the charitable policy of Tom’s Shoes: for every pair of shoes you buy, the company donates a pair to a child in need.

Conscientiousness is, of course, a wonderful, virtuous thing–a quality in a company that can bring larger good into our world.

But what if we actually took the “conscious” in “conscious company” to literally mean consciousness–a heightened state of awareness? What would a genuinely conscious company look like?

This isn’t merely a matter of semantics or wordplay. Bringing the notion of consciousness into an organization can be a game-changing move. The deep self-awareness and knowledge implied by consciousness is at the heart of why some companies succeed and others fail.

Before we look more closely at the conscious company, it will be useful to look more closely at what we mean by consciousness. This is a complicated question that’s long perplexed philosophers, psychologists, neurobiologists, and artificial intelligence specialists.

Each kind of expert has his or her own definition of consciousness. For instance, neurobiologists study brain waves–the chemo-electrical energy that our brains make–embracing a clinical, empirical view of consciousness. Those in the realm of artificial intelligence talk about machine consciousness, or synthetic consciousness, showing how we can replicate fundamental human brain functions in machines: basic abilities like awareness, imitation, acquisition of knowledge, memory, anticipation, and higher-order abilities like creativity and ethical reasoning. Psychologists informed by Freud and Jung take a more subjective, individualized approach to theorizing consciousness, exploring how past experiences stored in our unconsciousness inform our waking consciousness.

These many different accounts of consciousness speak to the intricacy of this heightened state of being. When a company becomes conscious, it activates all of these various forms of awareness.

Why is it important for a company to gain consciousness? There are three guiding principles that can help us see the benefits that any conscious organization enjoys. The first is that being aware is better than being unaware. This may seem like a no-brainer, but the insight here is indispensable. The Gallop Organization recently studied and ranked companies based on their employee engagement score and the company at the top–USAA–also had extremely high customer satisfaction scores. Thus, the most self-aware, the most engaged organization is also one of the happiest: the more conscious a company is, the more people will like it.

The second principle is that being self-aware helps companies align their intentions with their actions, to make strategic decisions directly out of goals and desires. Here, Google’s favorite corporate motto immediately comes to mind: “Don’t be evil.” This represents a union of intention and action through strategy.

The third principle is that mindfulness allows the company to anticipate the future. With this predictive knowledge, companies can develop competencies and alliances that capitalize on opportunities and avoid threats. In 2006, Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford, did precisely this. He secured $23 billion in loans for the organization–an amount well in excess of what was needed to restructure the company. He did it because he thought that a recession was imminent and he wanted to avoid bankruptcy. By looking forward, he ensured that Ford would thrive at a moment when so many of its peers suffered.

The great paradox of human consciousness is that, in order to reach it, we must look both inside ourselves and outside at others–friends, neighbors, communities. This is also true for the company: the optimal state of awareness is one that integrates an organization’s idiosyncrasies with the dynamics of entire industries and global concerns.

Achieving consciousness is not a state you can reach by simply following concrete steps. It’s a state of awareness that looks different for every company, that requires many different skills at different moments of an organization’s life. Here are three questions to ask yourself as your company finds its way to consciousness.

What is the mind of your company? If you had to locate the central nervous system of your organization in a particular sector, where would that be? The most conscious companies will have a neural center that is fresh, diverse, and dynamic. If the mind of your company is headquartered in your senior executive team, then your company isn’t very conscious because it has a very limited purview, a built-in myopia. Try to build a neural center with the widest view possible.

Is your company self-aware? A true sign of self-reflexivity is the ability to make sense of the things that happen within and around you. The most effective way to do this is by coming up with a narrative arc. What is the story of your company? And can your organization tell that story to itself–and to others?

How does your company integrate its parts into a perceived whole? Successful groups of all kinds–families, teams, organizations–bring together their individual units with a guiding principle. Businesses too often rely on empty, superficial concepts like leadership or culture as unifying forces. Consciousness is not the same thing as culture–it’s something greater than that. How does your company synch itself up?

Like a good, difficult question, consciousness is not a single problem that is solved once: it continues onward and gains complexity over time. So once you ask these key questions, go on to ask new ones. How will your company see, feel, and reason its way toward a more conscious future?

Walking The Tightrope On The Innovation Bell Curve

Breakthrough innovation typically starts at the edges of the bell curve in the challenge of a crisis or the prospect of an outstanding opportunity. This is because the risk of deviating from the standard way of doing things and the reward of taking a chance on something new is reversed in these extremely negative and positive situations. For example, the Apple we know today was born out of its near collapse in the late 1990’s and the Telsa we currently marvel at can do no wrong because the public adores its haute couture product.

Leading innovation is different than all other forms of governance in that it pulls the exceptions at the edges of the bell curve to the stable center in an attempt to bring useful novelty into the norm. In this way, innovation often incites commercial revolutions: ubiquitous connectivity replaces shopping malls and universities, smart gadgets replace billfolds and magazines, miracle drugs replace invasive surgeries and going to the gym, and the like.

Up until recently, I supposed that innovation was the only domain that worked in this unique way. I was wrong. I now see that politics follows the same trajectory – but in reverse. Instead of the innovation dynamics pulling the outside-in, politics pushes the inside-out where we mistake the edges for the center.

Listen to the bewildering jumble of candidates and try to discern an underlying philosophy, the trajectory of a strategy or the application of a discernable method. How do their ideas hold together to create a solution? Each candidate tries to move the center farther and farther out to distinguish their ideas from the others. Soon perspective is lost and edges are taken to be the center. Marketers call this micro-segmentation. Everyone gets to have their politics their own way but only in their own little world. Collectively, where social contracts bind us in a common purpose, the center can’t hold because it can no longer be seen by all.

Follow the barrage of spin on your favorite social media site and it becomes evident that the various factions have little regard for the issues but a zealous allegiance to their party affiliation. The voices of the most rapacious and opinionated are the loudest and drown out the calm interpretation of the facts by the reasonable. Perhaps the great Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell put it best, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”

I was recently in an airport when a man standing next to me started yelling at the television monitor in the gate area. I looked over expecting to hear some alarming newsflash about yet another tragedy or catastrophe. Instead, what I saw was an interview with a politician who presented himself in professional manner. When I asked the man standing next to me why he found the interview so upsetting, he explained that the politician was his congressman and he had completely changed his position on a key issue. I asked why. The man informed me that his representative had been on a committee to study the issue, and in light of the new facts, had adjusted his position. I was confused. I asked, “Isn’t that what intelligent people do, they get new information and change their minds?” The man released a torrent of obscenities my way and stormed off.

I tell the story because we often assume that our passions are informed by our reason, but for the most part, it’s the other way around. This man believed in something even when the facts suggested otherwise. He became a prisoner to his own limiting beliefs. He is unlikely to find innovative new ways to do things because he is unwilling to look for them.

So what does all of this have to do with innovation? Simple, innovation leadership is a tightrope performance on the bell curve. We need to see possibilities but be grounded in reality. We must demonstrate real conviction for our vision but be willing to change it as experience demands. We need to be open minded in the generation of ideas but critical in our deciding which ones to pursue. We need to believe we can succeed but be prepared to fail. In essence, we must assume a higher point of view and keep our balance if we are to move forward across the high wire.

There can be no variation, deviance or innovation if we do not share a nexus, fulcrum or center by which to gauge and navigate a way forward together. Perhaps the first step is to find our equilibrium by focusing on the center, regaining our perspective and reaching out to save our best ideas before they slide off the edges. The second, allowing the unbalanced to fall away where the slope is steepest.