innovation

The Architect writes: This guy in the clip (below) is real. He used to work for Hounslow Council in Chiswick, West London and used to dance past the bookshop my wife worked in. See Phil's commentary, below the clip, once you've watched it, for a serious leadership learning point.

In case your company blocks YouTube at work (the space below will be blank if that is the case) here's a link to just one of the YouTube clips of Ziggy, Chiswick's dancing street cleaner, that you can email to yourself to watch somewhere else.

I love stuff that just makes us think differently about how to take the lead in solving the world's problems. The inventors of this (below) did it for commercial reasons. But, all technology gets cheaper and cheaper, so it may one day have wider applications where people need water (until then, there's always WaterAid, if you want to help for a few cents a day). 

Access to clean water and sanitation is a major problem still for millions the world over.

Which company created on-line bookselling in the 1990s? Amazon.com? Nope. The first on-line bookstore was set up by an Ohio-based bookseller named Charles Stack in 1991. Jeff Bezos didn’t launch Amazon till four years later.

We’re constantly being told that leaders need to foster a culture of innovation, to move into Blue Ocean spaces where no competitors exist, then profit from the customers before our competitors copy us and move into the space we have created.

One of the first things Jack Welch did as a 24-year-old manager of a GE plant was blow up the part of the plant he was responsible for.

The head of the plant called him to his office to explain.

Welch, assuming this was the end of his managerial career, duly explained that he was experimenting with a different mixture from the standard one and it had caused an explosion. The plant boss probed further, asking him why and what he had hoped to achieve.

Satisfied that Welch had

a) learnt a lesson from the experiment and