Ignore The Obvious speech on Innovation at Argyle Executive Forum (slides)

This morning I gave a keynote at the Argyle Executive Forum event in NYC.  The title of the talk was “Ignore The Obvious” covering a wide range of areas to help the audience better understand and use innovation as a competitive advantage:

• Doing the obvious is what everyone expects
• Doing the obvious is average which means its boring and who wants to be boring
• To ignore the obvious, you need to think differently.
• Our brains are wired to avoid risk … think of the feeling you get leaning over the edge of a cliff
• Innovation is a risk and people will avoid it out of “fear”
• One major roadblock for innovation is the “corporate hairball” .. the rules and assumptions that build up over time
• The corporate anti-bodies are part of every organization with the self defined charter to protect the organization from risk (violating the “rules”)
• The key to challenging the corporate hairball, the anti-bodies and to be successful in innovation is ask questions
• Not just any questions but killer questions