Evolve, Dominate or Die
Story of Eddie Obeng, retold
Can you learn faster than the world changes? The answer is no! Everything you know will break down one day. The general response to fast, constant change in the world is to do more. This results in a higher workload and piles of half-finished work. Unfortunately, working harder is no longer an effective response. That’s why we have to make sure we change. That’s the first challenge of innovation.
Innovation should not occur as a reaction to the world, but rather, should initiate action. Development is not easy. You hope things will work out fine. But what are we supposed to change? I think it’s the way we think. Innovation is a question of looking at things from a different perspective. You have acquired ideas in your head and hence look at the world through automatism. Everything you’re one-hundred percent sure of is probably rubbish. Our ideas about innovation are primarily ‘junk’ from the 60s. We still assume that filling a funnel with enough ideas will produce nothing but good ideas. And we do that in separate departments that are very expensive and often kill the best ideas.
Today, innovation is about quickly selecting and applying good ideas. Intelligentlyconverting new ideas to ‘nice surprising amounts of money’. Innovation is never‘planning by numbers’, because you don’t know exactly where you’re going.Don’t spend your time stating goals. Look at where your ideas run dead in yourorganization instead.
Eddie Obeng is professor in growth and innovation at Henley Management College, founder and director of Pentacle International, the virtual business school in London. He's sometimes a guest-speaker at de Baak.
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