Everything Has a Personality

While developing Personality Poker, one thing I discovered is that lots of things have personalities: People, Political Parties, Products, Places, and Organizations (I could not find a “p” for this last one). When you look at everything through the lens of a personality, you begin to see why individuals gravitate towards (or away from) certain […]

How Can Goals Enhance Creativity?

In my previous blog entry, I discussed how goals can either enhance or detract from performance. Over the years, I have written numerous articles on “The Performance Paradox” that show how an obsession with the future reduces performance in the present.  And typically, creativity is significantly diminished in the process. But given that businesses are […]

When a Goal is Not a Goal

This post marks the 500th entry on this blog. Today I want to discuss how to have goals that are not goals.  How do you do this? For most people the present is designed to give them a future they want.  For me, the future gives me the present I want. Here’s what I mean […]

Doing Nothing to Enhance Creativity

We are in such a fast paced society that we are always focused on achieving our goals.  In business, these goals might be hitting quarterly earnings targets, sales quotas, or operating budgets.  Even innovation initiatives are goal-driven.  We measure ideas generated, time-to-market, and percent of revenue from new products. We are indeed a goal-driven society.  […]

From Tarot Cards to Poker Cards to Personality Poker

In my upcoming book, “Personality Poker,” I had an appendix which discussed the history of poker cards and how this led to the Personality Poker card game.  But when it came time for the final printing, the publisher felt that the book was too long.  Therefore the appendix was cut and is included below for […]

Are You Smarter than a PhD?

“Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?” is an entertaining show. In the world of innovation, the biggest question is, “Are you smarter than a PhD?” Here’s what I mean… In Personality Poker we address four primary innovation styles.  The spades are the ones who are, as we would say in Boston, “wicked smaht.” We […]

Speaking @ NASA

Tonight I am speaking at NASA’s annual inventors awards banquet. I’m honored to be speaking there again. For those of you who missed it, here was my last presentation to NASA. That time I had only 6 minutes! This time I have a whopping 20 minutes. Click the bottom right button on the video player […]

You Failed! What's Next?

Last week, I had 3 conversations with 3 different companies.  And each had a complaint about the same group of people: lawyers. If you think about it, innovators and lawyers have completely opposite objectives. Innovators want to grow the business.  They believe that risk and failure are a natural part of the innovation process. Their […]

Redefining Failure

I view life as a series of experiments.  When you look at it through this lens, failure means something completely different. One definition of an experiment is: “A test or investigation, especially one planned to provide evidence for or against a hypothesis.” The only way an experiment can fail is if you don’t get the […]

Measures: Will You Get What You Want?

I recently spoke with a new client who shared with me their innovation measures.  When I looked at their measurement system, I immediately saw flaws. But before addressing these imperfections, let me first provide you my perspective on innovation measures. In general, there are three types of measures associated with “challenge-based” innovation (be sure to […]