Innovation Cannot be Forced, Innovation Happens!

Innovation means brining the new into the world. And the new cannot come from the mind. If you carefully understand the mind, it is knowledge. The mind is composed of all the information that we have accumulated till date. It consists of all the knowledge that we have gained from people, places, books, magazines, articles, research, things and objects. All these information that has been stored in our memory constitues our data base. And this data base is old. These consists of things that are already there, otherwise there would not be in our memory. We must have had this information collected somewhere, sometime in the past. When we "think", we only search through the data base of old files and perform permutations and combinations with the available data. Therefore thinking cannot lead to creation of something new. Thinking cannot be used to Innovate, because whatever we think is all old. Even our goals are a part of this knowledge. All goals are from the memory; whatever we decide to create in the future, has already been in the past, otherwise we would not be able to make it into a goal. So making a goal to innovate somthing is also futile; we are bound to reinvent the wheel in a different way. Real innovation is - going beyond the human mind.To read more Click

What skills are in demand?

The working environment whether in companies or humanitarian industries is changing very fast. Forbes has published an article which talks about the basic skills that are in demand which can fetch you job in 2013 with the title the 10 skills that will get you a job in 2013. How you think systems through and work within the context of the team. Having the mind set of applying the learning, having the mindset and logic to process the learning are some of the critical skills in demand.  Let me summarise the skill sets here

1. Critical thinking
2. Complex problem solving
3. Decision making
4. Active listening
5. Computers and electronics
6. Mathematics
7. Operations and system analysis
8. Monitoring
9. Writing computer programming
10. Sales and marketing

The first four applies to all industries. whether one needs new job or continues to work in the same job but the challenge for us is are we prepared for the new demand of skills?

Can we reduce Infant mortality?

I am at Patna attending in the World Vision India's ToT training programme on Maternal and Child health. Volunteers, staff, ASHA workers from 7 districts (Bhojpur, Patna, Vaishali, Muzaffarpur, Nalanda and Nawada are participating. Infant mortality rate: total: 46.07 deaths/1,000 live births male: 44.71 deaths/1,000 live births female: 47.59 deaths/1,000 live births (2012 est.) (Source:India Infant Mortality (2012).
 In a layman term Infant Mortality is children dying between 0-12 months of their birth. Dr P.K Goswami says that 50% of Infant mortality comes from New Born death i.e. children dying between 0 -28 days of their birth and 50% of the new born death is contributed by children dying between 0 - 7 days. So logically we can conclude that if Infant mortality in India to be reduced the New Born death (0-28 days) has to be stopped. Otherwise it is very difficult for India to bring down IMR.
So what are the various causes of new born deaths? Dr Goswami said that following some are the medical causes 1. Hypothermia (Temperature of child's body is less than the normal), 2. Birth Hypoxia 3. Birth Trauma, 4. Sepsis 4. Pneumonia.
Then how could New Born death be reduced. Dr Goswami cited the following few preventive measures:

1. Wrapping of new born baby with clean clothes. cover head, hands and feet
2. Breast feeding
3. Eye care of the new born
4. Care of umbilical cord
5. Cleanliness

Dr Goswami says that if these few simple actionable actions are done 50% of new born deaths can be prevented.

I sent an SMS to Dr Jayakumar Christian, CEO of World Vision India. He said, "Strange that with solution that simple we still let millions die in our country."
What we need then? We need to relook our public health strategy. Simply shouting at government will not prevent new born deaths. Create mass awareness among the mothers, Panchayats, health workers, TBAs. NGOs promote this vigorously. It does not cost much but need Personal Passion. One need not wait for government to come to rescue the new born babies. This could be done by any one who really wants to save lives of new born.

Again, this is the responsibility of every individual to help save lives. If India has to reduce IMR then issues of New born death has to be addressed at any cost.

Strategy implementation: An alternative to inspiring through fear

Source: Knowledge Network: Faculty & Research

Leaders get paid to think big, which means they sometimes announce ambitious initiatives and then leave the details for others to figure out. These leaders hand down the marching orders and expect targets to be hit. But they are not around at 3 a.m. to see the fallout on the rank and file.

They do not see the impact on people like the project manager we recently met in a Fortune 100 company. She routinely returns home from work around 7 p.m., cooks dinner for her family and puts her daughter to bed. Then she opens her laptop and works several more hours, often until 3 a.m.

We asked her why she does this. Her response serves as a wakeup call for leaders everywhere who distance themselves from strategy implementation. “They keep adding new initiatives,” she told us. “These leaders don’t fully understand what it takes to translate their vision into results.” This project manager is a high-performer who refuses to fail. But she has human limits.

Click to read further..........

Effective leaders are effective storytellers by Daniel Goleman

Good storytelling is a hallmark of effective leadership. It’s a medium that allows leaders to move others. It also lets others know who the leader is. How the leader thinks and feels. I recently spoke with my colleague Howard Gardner for my Leadership: A Master Class series. Howard talks about three kinds of story telling approaches. One is the ordinary story. These are the stories that everybody tells, in this sector, in this domain, in this company, in this school. Then there are the leaders who bring a new twist to these same old stories. There’s also the visionary leader who creates an entirely new story, which makes me think of the role of story telling in innovation and creativity.

Below is a recap of Howard’s thoughts on how and when leaders might use storytelling techniques to motivate and inspire.

I would want to make a distinction between the role of stories in the actual creative process and then the role of stories as it were, spreading the creation to others. I'm absolutely certain that a very important part of any new invention, whether it’s mechanical or literary or artistic, is a narrative vehicle which helps people relate to that. It helps them understand the ways in which it is complementary to, or consistent with or directly in clash with, what you did before.

I think the most iconoclastic painting in the twentieth century is Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. It was so shocking at the time that he kept it under wraps for a decade because almost nobody could handle it. I think the narrative around the introduction of something new is imperative. When it comes to the actual creative process itself, I think that would vary enormously.

If you were working in a science lab and you pick up something that's askew and you decide rather than ignoring it or throwing it away, you really dig into it, I think you could talk about a narrative in a kind of metaphoric way. Namely how we used to phrase this one way and now we frame it another. It’s an interesting idea to see how far you can push this story angle not just in terms of public presentation and convincing, but actually in terms of creating the new ideas themselves.

In terms of startups, let’s look at Mark Zuckerberg. He probably got the Facebook idea working in his dorm room. We all will think it happened the way it happened in the movie, Social Network, and he didn't need anybody else for that. Once he began to become an enterprise, then clearly he needed to be able to attract people. He also needed to have direct and indirect leadership qualities to effectively tell his story.

Direct leadership means you know this is the person who is trying to convince you of something, and you look at what he says, how he says it and how they behave. Direct leadership can't survive the hypocrisy test, because if you push something very strongly in your narrative but every day you're undoing it in your behavior, then you have Newt Gingrich, who is not very convincing any more because what he calls for is so violated by his own life.

Indirect leadership is simply creating some kind of a symbolic product. It could be a literary work or it could be a mathematical equation. It could even be a computer program which itself is so heretical against the earlier standard that people consciously or unconsciously say “God!” We better pay attention to this. There are some inventions that you don't need to mobilize anybody else. I mean if you prove Fermat's Last Theorem and you publish it, the work is done, but if you're trying to start a corporation, you need the venture capitalists and you need people who you can count on to give you honest feedback.

Entrepreneurs need to be very effective story tellers, because basically it’s a promise of a possibility that they're selling to people, and they're mobilizing people around them. If anything, I think this has probably become too important. Namely, if you're a great story teller, you have more success than warranted, and if you're a lousy story teller you may never get to first base. What I would then say, and I don't know a venture capitalist personally, to what extent are they smart enough to basically filter out the charisma and look at the idea per se?

Source: Linkedin