Innovation is overhyped

Among the many words that are overwrought in business and shoved into public discourse far too often, innovation is an egregious example. If you look closely at your business, there are three things that you will observe:

1) You're not as innovative as you think you are.

2) Your company is not as innovative as you think it is.

3) You are producing a commodity. You should stop trying to convince yourself otherwise, and embrace whatever it is that you do better than your competitors. And then prune away all the nonsense that prevents you from improving it daily.

Yes, in the meanest sense of the definition, innovation may be part of your processes because you can claim a newness to what you're doing. Yet that is likely a dubious claim. Whatever is new in your business, is only a factor of difference from what your competitors are doing. Such a factor is likely to be a few percentage points on a scale, and certainly not a significant one.

It's not significant because you've studied your competitors, benchmarked against the leader in your category, carefully considered the industry best practices, and convinced yourself that you're creating processes for successful innovation. When you do all of these things, you assure yourself of creating a commodity. Just as you do when you spend precious resources on studying your clients/customers/buyers via focus groups.

If you are truly innovative, however, congratulations on creating something truly unique. Now, prepare yourself for your competitors to catch you.

Gardening Is More Than Gardening

It's been a while since I've posted here, and it's mostly because I've been chasing a train of thought in my free time. It's a runaway train that hasn't wanted to be caught and may take a long time to board and explore.
In a nutshell, however, the idea is simple:
Our lives, our families and our work are a garden. We must tend them all with care.

Though simple, this idea is also huge. It spins on it's head a lot of the vocabulary, processes and structures that have been put in place to define and capture our lives. In many ways we live in a proto-industrial age. We've not split from the 19th Century sweatshops and assembly lines. We've simply sped it all up.

Look at public schools. Students are shuttled from one class to the next, one subject to the next, down the assembly line of educational stimuli. And they're tested at thousands of stops. Yet, everyone seems to agree that they're not being taught well (especially in Texas from what I see and read). 

Yet no one questions the process as a whole. They merely question the output.

We must rethink it all.

We must realize that gardening is more than gardening.