GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

Innovation has many mothers. Over the past few decades, designers have been steadily moving onto the world stage as central figures, arbiters and midwives, in the birth of new innovations. Both inside and outside the corporate process, as seen regularly on the uber-TED channel, and of course (bow, scrape) through the “more money than the US Government” DNA of Steve Jobs and i-Life, the inseparability of design and innovation has mainlined into our collective consciousness.

There is no better place to feel the heat and experience the visceral force of design thinking in action then the Design Matters interviews, the internet radio show archives of Debbie Millman, herself a pioneer in designer-led innovation as author, AIGA President, Sterling Design leader and industry energizer. When you need a source of inspiration. We’re just saying…Go Debbie.

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

JUST when I was feeling completely physically and spiritually exhausted by the dumb and dumber Debt debate….this popped onto the screen of my i-phone and I was momentarily renewed by the automatic smile inside that this voice so often provokes:

The “2Rs”: Relentless. Resilient. All you need to know??

15 hours ago
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and then…

In the Resilience. Grant, looks calmly from his pipe, to a reeling Sherman after 1st day rout of Union at Vicksberg: “Lick ’em tomorrow.” (He did.)

16 hours ago
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followed by

RESILIENCE is hire-able. (Look for it.) RESILIENCE is trainable; be explicit. RESILIENCE is promotable. RESILIENCE these days = Strategy.

19 hours ago
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In these three tweets we get a slice of the relentlessly resilient mind of Tom Peters.  Like the rings of a tree they show us the natural history, the whole shooting match at a glance, and why he is a decades-worthy voice to listen to or better yet catch like a trout in the stream of Twitter.  Wait, wait, wait, nothing happening, river sure is pretty in a mind numbing kind of hypnotic way…Oops there’s a tug, ah, there…GOT IT.

HE is Relentlessly Resiliently expressing his DNA and on his game as grand Observer/Interpreter of….the world.  His willingness to not just weigh in but shout at, cajole, murmur, and stir the global conversation might have just been the pre-cursor for Biz Stone, as Tom is master of soundbites aka 160 character epithets.  Short and only sometimes sweet.  Pungent and provocative is more like it.  And yet, I lost count of the number of people who looked me in the eye (when I worked for Tom) and told me “I built my business on (Thriving on Chaos)” I knew exactly what they meant.  I built the training department at Anixter on Tom’s ideas writ large in books and especially videos…“The stain on the tray table just MIGHT mean something about the engine maintenance!”


What really happened is that the collective WE in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s built our practices on Tom’s inexhaustable supply of content and courage.  Including I might add, a young Seth Godin at Stanford.


Tom!  The Chaos is very real and it keeps coming. So please keep going. Keep tweeting. And while I realize you don’t need to be asked…because it’s what you do for breakfast, this is a Warning Across the Bow: The first in a series of love letters to Mr. In Search of Excellence and an exceptional life worth living on Innovation Excellence.

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

Charming Princeton drop out Seth Prietbatsch gives us a quick lesson in game dynamics filled with user-friendly references (Happy Hour!) that can nudge us over to this compelling view of life, including the most prosaic, everyday tasks, as…a GAME.   Which means, from an Innovation Excellence/Build Capability perspective that we better be cranking on that GAME LAYER if we want to make our products, services and experiences BETTER.  And, yes, as one of the technocrati I just shared this with reminded me…the video is a whole year old  (Thanks Melissa!)  Don’t care. It’s as relevant (aka still missing) to every business I know as it was back in July 2010.

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

When I finally met Clayton Christensen last year, at the Tribeca Film Festival’s first annual Disruptive Innovation Awards, I was struck by how much he loves the world, and the way his work allows him to move through it, continuously learning and disrupting. Tell the truth.  Isn’t that why most of us work in innovation.

In this talk, “Christensen brings clarity to a muddled and chaotic world of education“
according to fellow author Jim Collins Christensen.  Think of this as a crash course in the business of learning from the uber disrupter and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution.

According to recent studies in neuroscience, the way we learn doesn’t always match up with the way we are taught. If we hope to stay competitive-academically, economically, and technologically-we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence, reevaluate our educational system, and reinvigorate our commitment to learning. In other words, we need to apply the capability of “disruptive innovation” to education.

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

If we study history, we probably know what to do to get out of this economic morass. And the Dow’s recent rebound notwithstanding it isn’t just to feel good about compromising on taxes. It is to take the high ground and long road of investing in innovation. Listening to Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times and Robert Hormats, of the US State Department, they went on to repeat and repeat and repeat their acknowledgment of the many forms of Innovation as “the answer” as they talked today about the economy ahead on the January 2 Wall Street Journal Report.

It would thrill me to no end to hear these very grounded guys down on bended knee sending a love letter to Innovation writ large. If, that is, I didn’t know just how hard it is to actually pull off and create innovation. There are many hurdles…perhaps the biggest are the twin dogs at the gates: will and imagination. It’s not ideas. We even love the idea of innovation. And god knows we love the i-life world that Apple has innovated for us. We KNOW what to do, don’t we? We know the church. But we don’t as a culture seem to know how to push open those doors, get past the dogs and get in there and do the work. It feels like a cognitive gap called Knowing-Doing. It’s not about praying. It’s about the skills and practices and tactics and the sheer sustained will to innovate. In this year’s blog posts I am going to relentlessly focus on examples of real and remarkable innovation at all levels- and the remarkable relationships that sustain them — with the hope that if we can see it show it we can help make it more real. In the meantime, there are 400,000 jobs (says Andrew Ross Sorkin) to create a month to get Americans out of the hole, and a decade worth of inspiration to help us start it up courtesy of this Maria Bartiromo interview…so watch it and tell me if you heard this beautiful a love letter to our economy, and our collective national soul: it’s time. Time to innovate.

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