Pen Your Ideas Into Interventions & Initiatives

It is, probably, a truism when it is expressed that ‘the largest things started by being small’. We were once kids, and we grew up. Some companies also progressed from good to great.

Ideas come and go, rapidly and prolonged. It would be opportune just to capture some of these down on paper (or a digital pad). You need not be so extreme to write every dream down on your notebook strategically placed on your bedside. Ideas morph into reality through a series of steps, sometimes serial and other times, sideways and sidestepped. By visualizing these ideas into words or pictures, you gain a better sense of what these latent ideas may become. Let these ideas come to be!

When you review your chicken scratches from years ago, you may rejuvenate a few initiatives: a business plan, a dream trip, creating a new connection, re-establishing existing relationships, or presenting a proposal. Before we can mark out our existence or territory, we will need to make our mark on a page. Motivational speaker, Anthony Robbins wrote his life-plan on the back of a map. The Virgin logo was drafted as a signature on a paper-napkin. The all-in-one, self-contained, beer-brewing unit by WillliamsWarns was thought and talked through in many conversions. How do you brew commercial quality beers within your own home? Put a master-brewer and a few engineer partners together and realize your diagrams and blueprints.

Leadership Lessons: Start small. Build it up from them. Write your ideas down for copyright reasons, and for your own recognition.

Book Review: Where Good Ideas Come From (Steven Johnson)

Steven Johnson returns once again in print after his insightful, bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You and The Invention of Air to address the universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? He answers in his infectious, culturally ubiquitous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture.

Steven Johnson is a science writer, once a rare breed confined to the academic domain and textbooks. With the emergence of science and social journalism, and journalists venturing into investigative science and social sciences, this genre has become popular with the mainstream reader in the past decade. Thomas Friedman’s best selling, The World Is Flat is already in multiple editions and variants have emerged (updated, expanded and made contemporary) including the 3.0 version!

Steven Johnson has made his book, Where Good Ideas Come From highly readable, if you enjoy:

1)    Innovation and innovative practices

2)    History of inventors

3)    Inventions and their origins/inspirations (Appendix covers all major inventions from the years 1400-2000)

4)    The merging of theories (evolution), chemistry, ecosystem science, social history and geography.

And, even if you did only possess only a cursory knowledge of each of the disciplines mentioned, you would still discover something useful. How are coral formations one of the most ecological clever and sound structures in architecture (and how it clicked with Darwin)? Why were some of the key inventions of the last few centuries (like the World Wide Web), actually collective innovations? Is invention still predisposed in the realm of solitude for the Lone Wolf, or is it a product of Collective Thought? In other words, for every secrecy-bound company like Apple, are there others equally successful that are the antithesis: open environments, networked, non-marketplace-bound products and services?

This book is also suited for soft-necked, armchair, workstation-bound, intrapreneurial types – those delegated with the responsibility of engaging an innovative culture at their workplace. Would this dream be realised, or is it still a pipe-dream - a small horn tooted, perfunctorily, by uncreative, left-brain dominant managers? Johnson attempts to address these issues, and I believe his argument goes full circle, and he succeeds on an optimistic note, however with some useful caveats. Johnson identifies seven principles for the genesis of ideas, and the conditions for development of good ideas for our careers, companies, personal lives, society and culture. He makes us reconsider our paradigms about the concept and business of invention and innovation.

His final chapter, The Fourth Quadrant may sound familiar with fans of financial-guru/author Robert Kiyosaki, yet it has nothing in common except a quadrant. The simple 2X2 matrix covers the relationship of individual/networked inventiveness and market/non-market orientations. It threads all the principles he proposed earlier seamlessly. You may wish to link it with other models of product differentiation, financial literacy, and brand values.

Highly recommended.