Quotables – 05/05/2017 – Tom Goodwin

In quotables we celebrate what’s been written on the internet that just makes a whole lot of sense in under a minute. 

This week, we look at Tom Goodwin, the person you probably already follow on LinkedIn with a huge 295k plus followers. Talking about disruption and innovation Tom had this to say….

“In life we often get causation the wrong way around. We think that happy, creative, entrepreneurial places with pool tables and free food, random gym equipment, dogs in the office, and everyone getting hammered at 4pm on a Thursday are the ingredients.

We see offices install table tennis tables and institute happy hours and we expect people to become creative, we are shocked when they don’t. It’s the wrong way around. Nice offices happen as a result of funky funness, they don’t make it.

Innovation is the same. We can’t retrofit companies with creativity, boldness, and crazy ideas through the installation of some aspects that may happened to exist in some companies we admire. Funky red asymmetric furniture, the post it notes, the parallax scrolling websites and the venture arms are great, what actually comes of it all?

There is a lot of codification and sanitization of innovation. It’s the innovation days with 20 curated and briefed companies, with the same short creds presentations, a neat scorecard to make selection easy, and a brochure to merchandise the effort put in.

It’s the startup safaris of Silicon Roundabout with the nice narrative and absolute zero chance of anything of any significance actually happening.

It’s the inspiration presentation from a startup founder that everyone wants to be, the trends presentation from someone with funny hair (if I’m lucky, maybe me). It’s the breakout sessions, the guest speaker and the workshop with the oddly big pens and bigger sheets of paper, and cliches about all ideas being good and maybe a picture of a lightbulb or a box. Codification and productization of innovation makes it easily buyable, but does it lead to much. And isn’t that the ONLY thing that matters.

Innovation is the opposite. It’s not a session, it can’t be shipped in, or outsourced for a sunny Friday. It’s a culture. It’s angry people who care and want to make change and (hopefully) people who will forgive them. It’s not a product and if it was it would look horrible, it would be spelt wrong, like probably much of this is.”

Read the full post and take a look at Tom’s other stuff here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomfgoodwin/