Innovation You: Four Steps to Becoming New and Improved by Jeff Degraff

Author:Jeff Degraff [Degraff, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345530707
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2011-07-25T22:00:00+00:00

be a target detective

When it comes to setting targets, we are all detectives. We are gathering clues and trying to solve a complex puzzle. A terrible detective will learn of a crime and then arrest whomever is nearby. On the other hand, the best detectives allow their thinking to “diverge,” casting as wide a net as possible to find as many clues and witnesses as they can. Based on what is learned from this information-gathering and thought-expanding work, a good detective converges on a new, narrower target—suspects—but then within that narrower category, the detective diverges again, casting an equally wide net for suspects. Only then does he or she converge on the few most likely suspects. Then, the best detective casts the wide net for ideas about where the suspects might be located. This alternating movement, from diverging to converging, from hedging your bets to optimizing for your most desirable outcomes, helps great detectives and great innovators of every kind to deal with the most frustrating aspect of opportunity: Most opportunities only offer part of what we want. A job may be what you want to do, but not at the level of compensation you want to make. It may be the right work at the right pay, but offer no promise of future advancement. It may satisfy you in all three categories, but require you to live in the wrong place, or work unaccustomed hours, or include a dozen other undesired complications. But even though opportunities rarely come in perfect form, that’s not necessarily a reason to reject them.

First consider whether you could treat each opportunity as an “investment” in your overall innovation “portfolio.” Just as investors mix different kinds of investments, diversifying their portfolios because they don’t know which kinds of investments will succeed when, look for the chance to try several approaches at once or to take on several part-time projects. That way, even if you are wrong about some, there are others that can still succeed—perhaps in ways that surprise you. As a rule, whenever you have a goal, you have the greatest chance of success if you are unyielding about where you want to go, but flexible about how you get there, especially as new information emerges.

Back in Step I, I said that there is no data about the future. Hedging them first and optimizing them later is a powerful way to develop targets in part because it works without any special knowledge of the future: Instead of trying to be a brilliant predictor of which approaches will succeed and which will fail, you try them all and let the results of your experiments make your decisions for you. In this way, a committed experimenter often winds up more successful than a brilliant analyst.

Sometimes this approach is enough to carry a person from a very unpromising beginning all the way through a satisfying life. Consider Jack, a young man who never did anything according to plan. Growing up in a factory town in the middle

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.