Genuine Insights

Rise Up!

What I love most about the spring isn’t Opening Day of baseball season or more daylight after a long winter. It’s the intoxicating smell of change the season brings to each of us every year. It’s strange, but I am seized with the desire to create, curate and change directions. And although starting something new or taking something in a completely new direction can be daunting on a good day, there is no better time for you to dare to activate your ideas because most of the planet is in creation mode.

Every time you see a sign of spring—from a flowering bulb bursting from the ground into bloom to a pile of little kids scrambling around on a ball field—make a point of acting upon your own possibilities for renewal with your business, projects, relationships, or creative endeavors.

What parts of your life are begging for renewal? And how—on a practical level—do you go about initiating this kind of change?

Innovative Café Time
From an entrepreneurial perspective, one way to get you started on this path is to fill your schedule with phone dates, hikes, museum jaunts, or café time with other interesting, successful, innovative entrepreneurs who you have been admiring from afar. I have seen many a venture start from a tea date of genius. Don’t think of this time as “social”—think of it as a boost, like a shot of B12, to stimulate your thinking and get your energies flowing in sync with growth and renewal of the season.

Organizational Idea Retreat
For folks within large organizations, create a list of the most inspiring people across the organization and reach out via text, IM, email, or phone to schedule “an idea retreat. “ These are ideation sessions—off the record and intended only to give voice to new concepts, recommendations for change, or new directions to explore. Encourage colleagues to take that muzzle off and spring forward with ideas during these curated idea-sharing meetings. In an ideal world, the meeting would be “recorded” graphically by a visual artist. Nothing is a more inspirational reminder of the energy and excitement of collaborative ideation retreat than that.

Go Solo
If you are a quiet soul who would rather curl up and die then participate in an idea retreat, consider taking your imagination out for a walk. Change up your weekly routine and carve out time for your imagination to play, paint, doodle, explore, and experiment. Every good idea is born from the imagination and we sometimes neglect this beautiful space within our minds. Feed it this season, nurture it and be sure your creative sensibilities lead the journey.

Happy Spring, Tribe!

Posted Apr 17, 2013 Tagged under: creativity, entrepreneurship, ideas and innovation

My Story and Your Story

Yay! Practical Genius goes on sale today in paperback. This may not be big news for you, but for me—a new author fueled with relentless hope and on a mission to democratize genius—today is a HUGE DAY!

This milestone and the positive energy that flows from it take me to the place where focus, motivation, and engagement intersect—exciting! In celebration of this landmark moment, I would love for you send me your stories, photos, drawings, video submissions, and quotes that illuminate your practical genius. Try to highlight any of the six ingredients that contribute to your genius—your passions, creativity, and values; and your skills, strengths, and expertise—and I will post everything I receive over the next 30 days.

Send me your story via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or via email at gina@genuineinsights.com and I will celebrate your genius with my tribe. And remember #PracticalGenius.

Oh, and don’t forget to order copies of this paperback for yourself and anyone else who needs to discover his or her own genius. Help me spread the message—genius is contagious.

To order your copy, visit:

Amazon

B&N

BAM

IndieBound

Powells

Here’s to actualizing our genius dreams together!
Gina

Posted Jan 8, 2013 Tagged under: genius, ideas and innovation, practical genius, publishing

Climbing High

I recently went on a hike with innovation writer Nilofer Merchant that left me wondering why every Tuesday can’t be power-fueled with genius like that.

You see, Nilofer joined me on this hike the day before her book was released. It’s hard to describe how much it takes to go from an idea, to a manuscript, to a real book you’re holding in your hand. The whole experience is similar to giving birth and when the due date is near, there’s a great deal of anxiety, excitement, and a bit of craziness that goes along with the release. The last thing you want to do before this big moment is spend time with a stranger—or so I thought.

Deciding to blaze a fresh trail of one-on-one conversation with me, Nilofer gamely headed out on our hike, generously sharing her ideas on the future of the social era while also kicking some science on being an entrepreneur, a mom, wife, and community advocate. I was out of breath—seriously, I was panting—from climbing the steep hills together, but I was also amazingly energized by the insights and laughter we shared above sea level. I felt physically, intellectually, and emotionally fueled…and what started out as a random Tuesday became a high-water mark for every Tuesday—and yes, they can all be that good!

You know how much I believe in the power of building relationships with the people whose work and thinking inspires you. That’s Nilofer. Here are a few of the big ideas I took away from her new book, The 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era:

• Don’t be the powerful “800-pound gorillas” of yesteryear; instead act more like a herd of 800 gazelles, moving together across a savannah, outrunning the competition.

• Where the gorilla was about having the right strategy, and having a few people own the direction, gazelles are about distributed ownership where talent at all levels is unlocked to contribute oneness and bring value in working together.

• Openness is the ethos of the social era. Organizations that focus less on setting up turf walls and more on being flexible end up being able to leap from opportunity to opportunity.

• The freelance revolution, the rise of flextime, the proliferation of virtual teams and offices—all of these trends and more add up to a big shift: “work” is increasingly about freedom, not constraint. This fundamental shift changes how any organization can create value.

Buy it here

About Nilofer Merchant:
She is a corporate director at a NASDAQ-traded firm, a lecturer at Stanford University, and a popular keynote speaker. She is the founder and former CEO of Rubicon Consulting. After working at Apple, Autodesk, and many other Fortune 500 firms, she wrote her first book, The New How, to share the secrets of unlocking collaborative innovation. Follow her on Twitter at @nilofer.

Posted Sep 25, 2012 Tagged under: authenticity, ideas and innovation, networking, social media and technology

Innovation Begins at Home

Today’s economists, educators, policy makers, business leaders, even the President of the United States paint a grim picture of a country falling behind in just about every measure. Our kids aren’t as smart as they used to be, our government is an obstinate, obstructionist wreck, we owe more than we make, and we no longer lead the world in the production of anything (except, perhaps, reality shows). If it weren’t for Steve Jobs making us look good for the last 25 years, America would be nowhere in the eyes of many of our neighbors around the globe. It’s not morning in America anymore, Toto.

It’s true that we’re losing our competitive advantage in the global marketplace and the implications are epic. When America loses its edge, it loses its confidence. When America loses its confidence, it loses its will to lead. And when America loses its will to lead, there are an infinite number of forces that are ready and able to fill the vacuum (China, Brazil, or the aforementioned reality shows, for example).

I don’t know about you, but I hate to lose. And the lack of genuine innovation in this country is one of the reasons why we’re losing. According to INSEAD’s 2011 Global Innovation Index, where we previously long held the #1 spot, the United States is now ranked #7, behind Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore, among others. And while the Boston Consulting Group has identified six American companies among the world’s top ten most innovative companies (Apple/1, Google/2, Microsoft/3, IBM/4, Amazon/6 and GE/9), it also ranked the U.S. 9th of out of 110 countries in its International Innovation Index. I’m proud of those great American companies, but I’m pretty bummed to be lagging behind South Korea, Finland, and Ireland when it comes to innovation.

We’re just not putting critical resources behind the application of new ideas and processes that innovation represents. Companies aren’t investing in innovation the way they should because public policy makers aren’t supporting innovation the way they should and the culture at large—that’s us—seems indifferent. If you’re not a Fortune 500 company or a Washington bigwig, is there anything an ordinary American can do to help reverse this slide toward mediocrity? You bet there is. Here’s what you can do about it right now:

1. Get loud about fixing K-12 public education. America is no longer producing the best-educated children in the world, far from it. “A skilled, educated workforce is the most critical element of innovation success—and the hardest asset to acquire,” Emily Stover DeRocco, president of The Manufacturing Institute, has said. With only 32 percent of the American graduating high school class of 2011 deemed proficient in mathematics, it’s no wonder we’ve fallen off the high-speed train of innovation. Whether you have children or not, the time is now to get involved in a fiercely aggressive, take-no-prisoners push to get our public education system back on track. The contents of a kid’s backpack are your first, best clue to the quality of his education. Get into a classroom every chance you get so you can see for yourself how policy and curriculum play out on a practical level. Go to your local Board of Education meetings and speak up. Lobby your local officials, your mayor, your governor, your senators and representatives in Washington; write to the President and the Secretary of Education—you know where to find them! And above all, use the big stick—your vote—to make sure they hear you on the subject of education.

2. Innovate by example. Whether you’re a shift supervisor on the assembly line, a junior accountant in the finance department, the CEO in the executive suite, or one of the millions of free agents and small businesspeople who keep the rest of this country in motion, the innovation starts with you. Be the risk-taker, the initiator, the collaborator, the ideator. Put yourself out there with new ways of thinking about what you do every day, especially new approaches to old problems. Innovation flourishes from the ground up in an environment of encouragement. Innovation also loves a leader. That’s you.

3. Be fearless. Courage—inspirational, game-changing, needle-moving courage—can be expressed in the smallest, most subtle but deeply impactful ways. Showing a bit of creative initiative in a project you might otherwise just phone in at work can feel a lot like jumping out of a plane—seems crazy to do but it’s profoundly exhilarating. Do it a couple of times and you’ll discover that at the heart of innovation isn’t creativity, it’s bravery.

Look, we’re not going to get out of this creative deficit tomorrow, but we’re not going to get out of it ever if we don’t each accept some responsibility for how we got here in the first place. And then invest ourselves, of course, in making America the monster leader of innovation that it once was.

You in?

Posted Jul 17, 2012 Tagged under: ideas and innovation

Unleash your Mental Superhero Powers

What if you could learn, think, read, remember and solve problems with superhero like speed?

Imagine what would you do with these new found superpowers? What books would you most want to read and finish? What new subjects could you learn and even master? What pressing problems would you solve and what would you
create?

Well, here’s the good news…

You already have this superpower inside you, right now. And, here’s the best part.

It won’t take years of training to begin to unleash these genius abilities, but only a few days.

This Friday, you can join myself and 300 influencers in entertainment, technology, transformation and business for a weekend of superhero brain power & purpose. The event is completely sold-out, but I want to invite you to join us live online so you can unleash your own mental superpowers with us.

Here are just a few of the amazing speakers:

==> Dr. Daniel Amen: NYT Best-Selling Author of “Change Your Brain, Change Your Life.”
(Dr. Amen will share with you his superhero lifestyle for optimal brain health, fitness, focus, and mental agility.)

==> Marilu Henner: Actress, Author of “Total Memory Makeover”
(The star of Taxi, has been featured on television this week (from CBS This Morning to Anderson Cooper) because of her rare ability to REMEMBER NEARLY EVERY EVENT IN HER LIFE.)

==> Scott Flansburg: The Guinness World Record Fastest Human Calculator, Author of “Math Magic.”
(Scott can do mental math faster than a PhD with a calculator. He will share strategies to do the same, while improving your logical/analytical mind.)

==> Jim Kwik: World Renowned Memory & Speed-Reading Expert
(Jim is a master of accelerated learning. He will be teaching you two of the most relevant skills to catch up, keep up and get ahead.)

==> Sir Ken Robinson: World Renown Expert in Education & Innovation
(Sir Ken has the most viewed TED presentation in history, seen by an estimated 200 million people in over 150 countries.)

==> Dr. Peter Diamandis: NYT Best-Selling Author of “Abundance,” Founder of X Prize & Singularity University.
(You’ve seen Peter in the news this week with Avatar & Titanic director James Cameron and the founders of Google partnering around asteroid mining. Peter will show you how the power of the mind will solve the planet’s grand challenges.)

==> And Many More!
Online spots are limited and in high demand.

Click here to unleash your brain’s superpowers

Posted May 24, 2012 Tagged under: genius, ideas and innovation