Friday, September 1, 2017

Tom Peters says that a great source of innovation is your angry people


Tom Peters has read hundreds of books about innovation and talked with thousands of people about it.  He has concluded that the best source for innovation is PoP: Pissed-off people. These are the people who are tired of the status quo and are determined to make a change. These are the folks who will go to the grave fighting to change things.  (Sound familiar - Sean Heritage, Rebecca Siders, Jason Knudson?)

They are the one who will overcome the inertia of stillness and change thing.  They overcome the resistance of the system. People universally don't like to be changed.  The people pissed off about the status quo are willing to take the heat and fury of the people/system they are trying to change.  (We need more pissed off people apparently - COs would be a good place to start - STOP maintaining the status quo; shake things up.)

Juan Trippe was the founder of PanAm. And somebody wrote about him and said this: “What drove Trippe? A fury that the future was always being hijacked by people with smaller ideas—by his first partners, who didn’t want to expand air mail routes; by nations that protected flag-carriers with subsidies; by elitists who regarded flight, like luxury liners, as a privilege that could only be enjoyed by the few; by the cartel operators who rigged prices. The democratization he affected was as real as Henry Ford’s.”

And I think whether it’s Juan Trippe and an airline or, again, whether it is a 26-year-old who thinks a purchasing process is the stupidest thing that he or she has ever seen in their life, that is the source of innovation. What’s the bottom line? Don’t get rid of your angry and furious people who are annoyed at you by the way you do things now. Sure it can go too far.  If you believe what I’m saying, fury, anger, irritation—pissed-off people—is the only serious source of innovation. Only. Period. One. Singular. 

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