Poke the Box

The relentless act of invention and innovation and initiative is the best marketing asset. To be really clear I’m not encouraging you to be bold and right. I’m not encouraging you to figure out how to always initiate a smart and proven and profitable idea. I’m merely encouraging you to start. Often. Forever. Be the one who starts things.

The relentless act of invention and innovation and initiative is the best marketing asset.

Kinds of capital What can you invest? What can your company invest?

As organizations have begun to coalesce around projects, they’ve made a startling discovery: the starting part is harder than it looks. How to invent and choose and stick with or abandon ideas, how to select and predict and forecast the future of a project—this is all difficult.

In short: show up.

Initiative is a little like creativity in that both require curiosity. Not the search for the “right” answer, as much as an insatiable desire to understand how something works and how it might work better. The difference is that the creative person is satisfied once he sees how it’s done. The initiator won’t rest until he does it.

The old system can’t work without the new. And the new system depends on unpredictable human beings adding unscheduled insights.

The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by. The challenge is getting into the habit of starting.

I’m not seeing a shortage of what-to-do knowledge. There are plenty of really smart, well-trained people in organizations large and small who know exactly what to do. The shortage is in people willing to do it. To take a leap. To walk out onto the ledge and start. Apparently, many of us have forgotten how to do it.