Good morning,
Waiting for the treasure? Here are the three nuggets of the week:
Nugget #1 is one of the new episodes of Changerider. Philipp Depiereux is hammering out one episode after the other. Recently, he has been taken to East Belgium. The episode also improved my geography knowledge a bit. Oliver Paasch is Prime Minister of this part of Belgium and explains the benefits of digitisation for rural areas. When it comes to location-independent work, he takes the same line as I did in my article on remote work. But his remarks on education are also interesting. It’s not so much about providing schools with iPads, but about making pupils fit for the challenges of the 21st century.
(30 min, video, german)
Video-Link: https://youtu.be/-93Y4A-yODE
Nugget #2 is another article from Harvard Business Review, which always has good articles about innovation. Peder Inge Furseth and Richard Cuthbertson show how to use your innovation budget wisely. The authors introduce the terms Innovation Capacity and Innovation Ability. The former can easily be bought with money, but is not enough on its own. Much does not necessarily help much. Nokia and Kodak serve as examples of companies with great innovation capacity. The result should be known to all. The authors derive three lessons from this, but for me it can be reduced to one message. Innovation must be value-driven. This can also mean that you need a different business model.
The Right Way to Spend Your Innovation Budget (6 min, text, English)
An ingredient for Innovation Ability is lateral thinking. Christoph Schlachte writes about this in Nugget #3. We all feel very comfortable in our filter bubbles. After all, it’s much less stressful when the others agree with us. We ignore complexity, long for simple, unambiguous answers and the one truth. The following sentence in the article shows part of the solution:
This requires managers who are capable of lateral thinking and at the same time trust and allow their employees to do so.
That is contrary to the traditional leadership picture, where managers make clear announcements, always know answers and control that instructions are kept. In the industrial age this may still have made sense. In times of complexity that is deadly – see the examples in Nugget #2. So you managers, have the courage to think outside the box and above all encourage contradiction! Then innovation ability grows.
Why we find it so difficult to think both ways (4 min, text, German)
I wish you a weekend. Happy lateral thinking 😉