Sharing my recent speech on how to use simple thoughts to innovate and stay competitive.
Speech Transcript:
Speech Transcript:
It was the award
night ceremony at our company. I was tense and nervous because along with 4
others, I was nominated for the coveted best manager of the year award. Five of
us were close colleagues and sat on the same table eagerly waiting for the
announcement. Everyone wished good luck to each other wearing their best smiles. Finally, the announcement was made and I was not the winner. The
winner lifted the trophy amidst rapturous applause while we, the 4 losers
drowned ourselves in copious amount of whisky at a pub. After drinking, all
losers suddenly became best friends, we blamed the system and shared with each
other how we felt from the bottom of our heart that one of us should have been
the winner.
Later, I
realized…..on that day we completely missed one point – the winner did things
differently, he was an innovator.
Today I will
discuss why innovation is no more just a “good to do” thing….but innovation is a
must to stay competitive.
Why is
innovation so necessary to stay competitive?
Because, more
and more people are getting good education, there’s an explosion of free access
to information, people are becoming more ambitious resulting in a situation
where most of the things are equal among individuals……except the ability to
innovate also called divergent thinking.
Now, Let us
find out what should we do to innovate…
First let us
understand the difference between creativity and innovation. Most of the time
we use the words interchangeably but they are different. Creativity is the raw
thought or idea that comes without being logical whereas innovation is the
implementation of the idea and bringing it to a logical conclusion.
Mankind is
designed to think creatively. Researchers believe that an average person gets
around 50 to 70000 thoughts per day. I believe there are 3 primary kinds of
thoughts – What, Why and How, most of the time we get “what” thoughts – for
example…
What are the
new concepts?
What is my
role?
These
thoughts are also triggers for creativity.
The “why”
thoughts are of two types – “bad why” and “good why”. Bad whys are all the
negative thoughts…..for example….
“Why my
salary is lesser than his?”
“Why should
I do so much work?”
“Why my boss
is not happy with me?”
But the
“good whys” makes you challenge the obvious and helps your mind to explore. For
example…
“Why do we
always do it manually when this can be automated?”
“Why I am
not losing weight even after dieting?”
We also get
“How” thoughts – they are rare but these thoughts helps us analyze. We should
always try to invoke this thought. For example…
“How can I
improve sales?”
“How can I write
better?”
“How can I
reach my goal?”
You must
have noticed that in all the examples I have used the word “I” because thoughts
are always your own. For example….If your subordinate is coming late to office,
you get a thought “Why is he coming late?” but once you ask the question to
your subordinate “why are you late?” then it is no more a thought, it’s an
action. We don’t want action during the idea generation stage. Just open the
window of your mind and let the ideas come in freely.
Once you
have generated enough ideas, you can start testing them to give shape to your
innovation.
To sum up -
encourage yourself to think, nurture the positive thoughts and stay competitive.
Remember,
the sunshine you see was created millions of years ago in the sun’s core, it
took millions of years for the sunshine to travel from the core to the surface
of the sun and it reaches you in just 8 minutes.
Start
preparing yourself and one day you will become the shining star.
