Eliminate To Innovate

By Jamillah Warner

Several years back, while talking on the phone with a friend from college, I was also going though my pile of things-to-fix-up-and-reuse. When she asked what I was doing, I told her and her reply was certain and final enough to get my full attention:

“Don’t keep broken things around you.”

She went on with what she was talking about, but her statement stuck with me.
In “The Upside-Down Approach To Innovation,” (http://www.openforum.com/articles/the-upside-down-approach-to-innovation) Anita Campbell asks a core question:

“What if we approached innovation from the opposite direction – by getting rid of what isn’t working before we try to come up with something that works?”

What if we cleaned house first, addressed the mess and made room for innovation? What if we let go of the junk now and let it become somebody else’s treasure?

It’s time to quit wasting our energy on hackneyed systems and broken equipment. It’s like Spring cleaning, getting the house ready for the new year, except doing it now.

You can’t know what deals to take advantage of if you don’t know what you need. You can’t get intimate with what you need until you let go of what you don’t need. Eliminate first. That process alone will make you feel lighter and smarter. Then you can innovate with more focus and precision.
Don’t let the junk get in the way of your next steps.

See this and other newsletter articles at http://amt-mep.org/files/3413/6250/0279/2013-03.pdf

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