Course 3: Tom Peters' Innovation
What you'll learn
- Create a culture of innovation in your workplace.
- Numerous attempts and failures are absolutely crucial for innovation.
- The importance of rewarding excellent failures and punishing mediocre successes.
- Diversity's direct impact on innovation. (Diversity of age, education, industry experience, home town, etc. in addition to race and gender.))
Requirements
- Desire to become a better leader or manager.
- Desire to improve your workplace.
- Involvement in an organization such as a company or club.
Description
“We made mistakes, of course. . . . We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. . . . While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.”
—Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg by Bloomberg
“You can’t be a serious innovator unless and until you are ready, willing and able to seriously play. ‘Serious play’ is not an oxymoron; it is the essence of innovation.”
—Michael Schrage, Serious Play
Innovation is “all important” now more than ever. No doubt about that. But my goal in this course is to demystify innovation. And Michael Bloomberg, offers a worldview that perfectly matches my own. I call it—as you’ll see—WTTMSW (Whoever Tries The Most Stuff Wins). The rub is: It’s no walk in the park to implant a “WTTMSW culture.” You must cheer useful failures—and even dumb ones. “It is not enough to ‘tolerate’ failure—you must ‘celebrate’ failure”—the word according to Richard Farson. But perhaps the best description of the WTTMSW culture comes from MIT Media Lab guru Michael Schrage who devotes an entire book to “serious play.”
“Bottom line”:
Try a lot of stuff/Bloomberg
WTTMSW/Peters
Most mistakes wins/Farson
Serious play/Schrage
Q.E.D.
There’s a second critical piece of the innovation puzzle. My version thereof: Hang out with cool, and thou shalt become more cool; hang out with dull, and thou shalt become more dull. Crazy times call for intimate and continuous contact with crazy people. Too many organizations are loaded to the gunnels with “same-same.” That’s the kiss of death for innovation.
Who this course is for:
- Leaders and managers trying to navigate these tumultuous times.
- Owners of small or medium size businesses.
- Executive Level Managers.
- Solopreneurs.
- B-Level Managers.
Instructor
Tom is a management guru, speaker, and best-selling author.
He co-authored In Search of Excellence, which has been called "the greatest business book of all time." His 2018 book, The Excellence Dividend: Meeting the Tech Tide with Work That Wows and Jobs That Last, received praise by world-renowned experts including Seth Godin, Jack Bogle, and Bo Burlingham. Tom started the personal branding movement with an article in Fast Company called "The Brand Called You."
Tom is passionate about Excellence in the workplace and offering simple ways to make big change happen. His Excellence Now Campaign 2020-2022 includes an eBook, Excellence Now: The 43 Number Ones, a book, Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism, and a six-part online course series here at Udemy called Excellence: Now More Than Ever. Tom, called "The Red Bull of Management Thinkers," is now offering his expertise on Udemy so that you can create a workplace that people love.