Albert Einstein once said: “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Sadly, many businesspeople are on career tracks where they feel like a fish being asked to climb trees. I used to be one of those people earlier in my […]
Wouldn’t it be great if all your new recruits fit perfectly into the vacant positions you wanted them to fill? And if everyone on a team worked in a role that allowed them to let their talents shine and played on their strengths, while others compensated for any weakness? Some of the hardest things to get right […]
“How can we make our organization more creative? And please, keep it simple,” a client interested in a creativity training for a group of Asian senior executives asked me. Infusing more creativity into an organization comes down to four basic challenges. They are: (1) Find out who your creative people are, and how many of […]
Managing people in the modern globalized workplace is like herding cats. Managers need to effectively relate to people’s unique personal styles and to different cultural, educational and generational backgrounds. That’s easier said than done. But what if there were a tool helping managers better understand the individual personal styles of their team members? TIPS, the innovation people profiling […]
Confucius said: “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” Have you ever realized that succeeding in business in general and innovation in particular is just about three things? Today, let’s take a few steps back and look at business and innovation in the most simple, essential way. Let’s begin stripping innovation […]
Last November, I was an invited keynote speaker and forum panelist at the Kuala Lumpur Innovation Forum 2015. The conference organizers asked me to start the panel discussion with a short presentation on two interesting questions: “What are challenges that innovators face in the real world?” and “What are the fundamentals to overcome these challenges?” Who […]
It was 8:27 am last Sunday when my phone rang. I was reviewing my presentation for a keynote talk that I was supposed to deliver two-and-a-half hours later at an international conference. “Where are you?”, the caller asked, “The conference organizers are looking for you. You’re supposed to start delivering your keynote in a few […]
While facilitating over a hundred innovation projects over nearly a decade, I noticed that different people have very distinct innovation styles. While working out Thinkergy’s innovation people profiling method TIPS, I developed a scheme to capture and systematize these personal innovation styles of different people. Thereby, I blended central aspects of a well-known innovation theory […]
A few weeks ago, I was in Hong Kong to teach a few classes and to meet with some companies. While there, I demonstrated my company’s new innovation people profiling method TIPS, which categorizes people’s innovation styles. One person who saw the demo thought that people might try to skew their results, and suggested a […]
Do you know how you — and everyone else on your team — really tick? In our increasingly complex and dynamic business environment, self- and team-awareness are more important than ever to use the talents and strengths of a team. For that reason, I have developed a ‘people’-oriented innovation profiling system called TIPS. TIPS is […]