Kevin Kelly’s Blog

“In the beginning, I looked around and could not find quite the car I dreamed of. So I decided to build it myself.”

Ferry Porsche

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” William Blake.

Stanford Business School Advisory committee have highlighted self awareness as the most important capability to develop.

(Source HBR February 2007)

When you truly engage in this trip, you too will come to a window through which life will be seen as it truly is, one of potential.

If you commit to bringing your employees on this journey, they too can expect a journey of adventure which will include change, obstacles to transcend, lessons to integrate, feedback packaged as failure, and so on. However they will find that they have the necessary resources to face the chaos, and move to the next level.

Remember fear, fear of change are learned, so they can be unlearned.

Face it and embrace Nietzche’s words:

“One must feel the chaos within, to give birth to a dangling star.”

 ”There is no genius in our company. We just do whatever we believe is right, trying every day to improve every little bit and piece, but when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution.”

Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota President

Toyota is now the largest Car Maker in the world having overtaken GM.

Kaizen ( continuous improvement), and respect for people are the two pillars of their famous “Toyota Way.”)

If every employee’s brief was to contribute one idea a month regardless of how silly or insignificant it might appear to them, this action would revolutionise any business.

It suprises me than in todays ever competitive world, where idea generation is integral to a company’s success, that we are not making inroads into inculcating creativity into our corporate culture.

Every company I believe should have an ideas executive to harvest the creative energy of the employees.

New products should not be the sole domain of the R and D department, it should be everybody’s business.

Start harvesting today.