BEST BOOK FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Book Title: New Ideas About New Ideas: Insights on Creativity from the World's Leading Innovators
Author: Shira P. White
The book itself is very innovative. From the title to the way it is written to the very last sentence. The book contains many innovative and even inspiring ideas and real life people’s stories which are combined together and reinforced by relating quotes by the most creative and innovative people in the world.
HIP, HOP, HAPPENING, or H3 is a must in innovative companies. It describes the most creative approaches and principles to make innovation happen, from how companies reinvent themselves and stay ahead of competition, to their passion and their love to discover, innovate and create, over and over again. A company’s goal is not only to make profit, but to survive in the market and according to Erica Jong, surviving means being born over and over again. This is an analogy to how companies have to continuously innovate in order to stay competitive, to “survive” in their markets.
Innovation often begins in a “spark soup: a fluid amalgam of data, in a creative broth, with swirling impressions, spoonfuls of sensation, and bursts of electricity…” That’s the way to go for companies. They should be constantly mixing new ingredients into their soup to create new sparks and “…so it goes. Conditions change. Tastes change. Ingredients come together in new ways. New sparks emerge. For H3s, it’s a way of life.”
This book is significant for the 21st century professionals, leaders and societies in the world because it teaches a great lesson on innovation, it teaches us to focus on the future, to attack the perfect problems first from a bundle of other problems, the one that will lead to next big leap in innovation, to ask the perfect question that will lead to the perfect problem and that ultimately will lead to a big heap in innovation.
There’s a story about innovation and how asking the right question to the right people can lead to it; in the book Edwin Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation and his daughter went to visit the Grand Canyon, and he had brought a camera with him to take some photographs of his daughter. “She was so excited by what she saw that she blurted out a question that took her father by storm: ‘Daddy, why can’t we see the pictures now?’” This question had led him to inventing a film that could be developed instantly. This is an example of how a simple and naïve question exposed a “perfect problem” for which Land later on found a perfect and innovative solution, changing the photography industry. Innovation is about response and about looking for new opportunities. “It is also important to be looking for the opportunities, not just to say you have done something to solve the problem, because the innovative answers are most often going to come from a place where you have not been looking for them.” After finding opportunities, the next step should be responding to it and taking action. Innovation is about attitude, risk and willingness.
Not only that, innovation is about being able to visualize, because the perfect question often lies outside of the range or our vision. In order to innovate we must be able to look at all different positions from all different angles. An experiment was made by psychologists, where they would put houseflies inside a container and close the lid and leave the lid closed for a couple days. After a couple days they would remove lid only to find that the houseflies wouldn’t try to escape, instead they would all stay in the container not even trying to go out of the lid. That is because they don’t visualize widely enough. An analogy can be made to what’s said before. The houseflies would not try to escape because they have restrained themselves inside the container, trying to escape for the first couple days, but seeing the couldn’t do it, they would stop doing it, accepting their fate, accepting to fact that they are constrained to some specific space, the commit themselves to the new space available to them. This is called by psychologists as unconscious commitment.
According to the author, if the process is the product, and the product is an innovation, the process is bound to be filled with innovation too. Innovation is everywhere; it is in every single step in a process. We can always innovate, no matter when, where or how. Innovation is in the air. We only have to breathe it in.
Perfection. “Our desire for perfection wraps us in paradoxes. On the one hand, we are taught to strive for the best—the ideal. We view perfection as an ultimate. It keeps us moving forward, with hopes of reaching Nirvana. On the other hand, perfection implies no room for improvement or change: It stops further development and, in fact, it often holds us back.” Reaching perfection is only the ultimate goal. But it’s not realistic. Instead of perfection we should strive for the ideal. We should never try to get to perfection; instead we should make things perfect enough.
Some quotes from the book:
To the man who has only a hammer in the toolkit, every problem looks like a nail.
—Abraham Maslow
You don’t want to start out with a perfect thing. That shuts you down.
—Leonard Dobbs
Real corporations have… real problems. These are all opportunities for innovation.
—John Seely Brown
The biggest challenge is always the status quo.
—Glenn Renwick
Finally this book is totally different than others. This is not only a book on innovation, creativity and ideas in industries, corporations, products and individuals. It also gives its readers new ideas about new ideas on how to innovate your own lifestyle, your everyday actions and thinking, how to live your life in a different way. This book is not just mere writings and opinions of the author. It includes quotes, ideas and inspiring stories about the world most innovative leaders, how they approach new ideas and create and innovate from them, and how they keep changing and coming up with new ideas, how they can visualize ideas before other people can even begin to put them down in words…
No comments:
Post a Comment