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"I have a life-long love of leadership, literature, and poetry, and I've realized over time that literature and poetry have a lot to teach us about leadership."
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"In those endless years it took you to grow out of childhood and stand on your own two feet, you learned about the world in doses. Some of what you learned (and thought you understood) has evolved over time with added experience, but some of the discoveries you made and the stories you constructed around them as a child, even as young as three, have stayed the same, child-like and unchanged, no matter how many years have passed.
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That's living life in the past, seeing the world around you through a child's eyes in a child's story. You've been walking around in kid's sneakers and they're much too small for you. Here's how to fit yourself out with good pair of hiking boots to go the distance."
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"As adults—in the workplace and elsewhere—when we're asked to do something we've never done before, when we need to grow beyond our current capabilities, we can tap into what we naturally did as children, and perform our way to who we're becoming.
For adults, though, play, performance, and pretending can feel anything but natural. We got the message in a myriad of ways as we left toddlerhood: Play is for kids, not for big people. We're supposed to color inside the lines; know the correct answer; understand how to behave and fit in. And there's no denying the importance of that learning—obviously we need to learn how to safely cross the street, say our ABCs and wake up an iPad. But this need to get it right eventually takes over. We learn what we need to in school and by the time we get into the job market, the support we got to learn developmentally as children is long gone. As an adult, it is embarrassing to not know. There are repercussions if we don't get it right. We feel stupid, and we make others feel stupid if they don't 'have it together.' Many (most?) of us get stuck being 'who we are'—as defined by ourselves and others—whether that's our personality (and the initials that we're assigned by the psychological tools that assess it), what kind of job we do or career we can have, if we're confident or insecure, and more. Without realizing it, we've gotten ourselves in a non-developmental box where there's not much room for new learning, growth, or experimentation.
But it doesn't have to be that way."
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"In the age of digital networks, businesses' abilities to create and share intangible assets, such as ideas, software, and relationships that are owned by each of us—the Network—has grown exponentially. Further, digital networks allow organizations to access assets that exist outside of their traditional boundaries. Uber is a transportation company without cars. Airbnb is a hotelier without properties. Amazon is retailer with stores. Network orchestrators—as we call them—are eating the world as we know it, changing the very nature of industries around the world.
The key is their ability to reach and leverage each and every one of us and all our relationships, information and assets. This access to and relationship with us and what we have (cars and homes), do (labor) and know (relationships and expertise) are critical to their success—as are the digital platforms that they use to enable us to share what we have with others. In short, where Thomas Friedman wrote the book that laid the ground for this network revolution—The World is Flat—and Marc Andreessen followed on with his 2011 article—'Software is Eating the World'—it is now clear that those were the foundation for today's reality—networks are eating the world.
As Thomas Melville wrote, 'We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us.' Today's digital networks are those fibers and the organizations that build and sustain will win big—bigger than we have every imagined."
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"There is a new wave of innovation taking place inside many organizations that gives people an opportunity to make important, innovative contributions to business and to society.
My beliefs about innovation have evolved and are now centered on three basic tenets:
Most of us can be far more innovative in business than we give ourselves credit for—especially when we realize innovation is a lot broader than just invention.
We can quickly learn to more innovatively observe and then transfer these innovations from one category to another.
Being more innovative is, in fact, learnable and even self-teachable.
[...] Innovation is more than an "I" thing... it's a "WE" thing. It is true that we must make a real, conscious effort to improve our own innovation skills. But there are also important changes that we can and should bring about in the organization.
Together, this will allow us to begin leading innovation from the new middle."
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