Once you have read Free Prize Inside, you will be motivated to learn more about how to bypass corporate bureaucracy, how to innovate by swinging for singles and doubles (and not over-swinging for home runs), how to develop soft innovations to help your company go from being good to great, how to jumpstart your business brain with new ideas, and how to be a star at work.
To continue these conversations started by Seth, I suggest reading these books:
Conversation: Bypassing corporate bureaucracy
Recommended Reading: Orbiting the Giant Hairball (Gordon MacKensie)
Conversation: Innovating by swinging for singles and doubles (and not over-swinging for home runs)
Recommended Reading: Profitable Growth is Everyone’s Business (Ram Charan)
Conversation: Developing soft innovations to help a company go from being good to great
Recommended Reading: Good to Great (Jim Collins)
Conversation: Jump starting your business brain … creating new ideas
Recommended Reading: Jump Start Your Business Brain (Doug Hall)
Conversation: Being a star at work
Recommended Reading: How to be a Star at Work (Robert Kelley)
Bypassing corporate bureaucracy
If learning to navigate through corporate bureaucracy interests you, then I recommend you check out Gordon MacKenzie’s message of Orbiting the Giant Hairball. Gordon explains the hairball this way …
A hairball is an entangled pattern of behavior. It's bureaucracy, which doesn't allow much space for original thinking and creativity. It's the corporate tendency to rely on past policies, decisions, and processes as a formula for future success. (source: Fast Company article.)
To navigate through the hairball of corporate bureaucracy, Gordon suggests we go into orbit.
Orbiting is vibrancy. Orbiting is manifesting your originality. It's pushing the boundaries of ingrained corporate patterns. It's striking a relationship with the corporation so that you can benefit from what it offers -- its physical, intellectual, and philosophical resources -- without being sucked in by its gravitational pull. It's a symbiotic relationship: without the hairball, the orbiter would spiral into space; without the orbiter's creativity and originality, the hairball would be a mass of nothing. (source: Fast Company article.)
Innovating by swinging for singles and doubles (and not over-swinging for home runs)
In Free Prize Inside, Seth talks about the risky business of making big bets on big ideas ... Ram Charan continues the conversation in Profitable Growth is Everyone’s Business by elaborating on how striving for singles and doubles is a more sustainable and profitable path to growth.
“Singles and doubles do not come from a look in the rearview mirror, extrapolating from what has been done in the past. Rather, they are a result of a looking at the business from the outside-in, from customer needs backward into the company. The impact of singles and doubles can be huge. In fact, they for, the foundation for the home run – they provide a business with the discipline of execution which is absolutely necessary to successfully bring a breakthrough technology to market or to implement a new business model.” (source: Profitable Growth is Everyone’s Business, pages 39, 40).
Developing soft innovations to help a company go from being good to great
Just as Seth advocates incremental change through developing soft innovations to creating great products and services, Jim Collins is an advocate for steady, incremental, consistent, momentum-building change to transform a company from being good to great. In Good to Great, Jim calls this incremental momentum approach to making sustainable change happen as the “Flywheel Effect.”
Now picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It's a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It's about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum -- mass times velocity -- is what will generate superior economic results over time.
Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving, you make a tremendous effort. You push with all of your might, and finally, you get the flywheel to inch forward. After two or three days of sustained effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. It takes a lot of work, but at last the flywheel makes a second rotation. You keep pushing steadily. It makes three turns, four turns, five, six. With each turn, it moves faster, and then -- at some point, you can't say exactly when -- you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren't pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing.
This is the Flywheel Effect. It's what it feels like when you're inside a company that makes the transition from good to great. (source: Fast Company article.).
Jump starting your business brain … creating new ideas
Both Seth Godin and Doug Hall believe brainstorming doesn’t work. In Jump Start Your Business Brain, Doug refers to brainstorming as braindraining and goes on to say …
Braindraining is neither effective nor efficient. With braindraining, the brain is considered the source of all ideas. A sort of library ready at all times for any withdrawals its owner may wish to make. (source: Jump Start Your Business Brain, pg 187.)
In Free Prize Inside, Seth shows that by going to the far reaches of the fringe, you can find remarkable ideas ripe for taking and tweaking into a soft innovation. He calls this process Edgecraft.
In Jumpstart your Business Brain, Doug Hall advocates exploring stimuli to fuel your brain to generate ideas.
Feed your brain with multisensory stimuli that are both related and unrelated to your challenge. The process of exploring stimuli sets off a chain reaction in your brain that brings new thoughts and ideas to life.(source: Jump Start Your Business Brain, pg 187.)
Throughout Jump Start Your Business Brain, Doug gives great practical advice for small business owners wanting to think “big” and advice for big businesses wanting to think “small.”
Being a Star at Work
Much of Free Prize Inside is dedicated to managing ideas from inception to implementation. According to Seth, the best people at navigating the process are Champions. Champions turn ideas into reality.
In How to be a Star at Work, Robert Kelley calls champions Stars. He goes on to write about how Stars develop networks to help them overcome their “knowledge-deficit problems” and to navigate through the corporate hairball.
Networking is the way work gets done. most people don't have all the knowledge they need to do their work. Jobs today are too complex, they're changing too quickly - or they just involve more work than one person can handle. That's why stars turn to others to get help. They use networks to multiply their productivity.
If you want to be better at networking, start by recognizing what you don't know but need to know. Then figure out who can supply that knowledge - and cultivate relationships with those people.
Stars do this all the time. They are always on the lookout for people to add to their network. When they find themselves in a meeting that's a waste of time - and we all have too many meetings like that every day - they use the time to identify people in the meeting who are worth getting to know.
Stars also understand the economics of networking. Average performers look at networking as if it were a right: They call someone they don't know and simply demand help. Stars realize that networking is a barter system. If you expect people to trade with you, you have to establish that you have something worth trading. You have to have expertise that people need but don't already have. You also have to be patient: Be prepared to help out a lot of people before you ask anyone for help in return. You start with a negative trade balance, and it takes time to build up credits. (source: Fast Company article.)
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