Book Summary Preview : CATS

The Big Idea

Curiosity might have killed the proverbial cat, but without it, very real achievements would never occur. With this book as your guide, you’ll learn how to spark your innate curiosity, pounce on problems in ways you’ve never imagined, and enjoy greater success and satisfaction both at work and in your personal life.

Playful, profound, and positively upbeat, CATS provides what you need to tap into your power of innovation and then unleash it to every member of your organization. While most business thinkers view this challenge from the top down, Stephen Lundin sees the subject from a CAT’s eye view, explaining how to get every employee, no matter what level, to think and act in innovative ways. Inside, he examines the challenges to innovation and offers practical measures aimed at conquering them.

Prowling inside every employee is a questioner, a creator, an innovator – claws out and ready to pounce. Become a CAT and you may find yourself springing on ideas in a way that surprises you and everyone around you.

Why You Need This Book

This book describes the nine lives of innovation, each of which is a step toward realizing your inner CAT and becoming a fully contributing member of an innovative organization.

THE FOUR BASIC CHALLENGES TO INNOVATION

The four challenges represent universal impediments to innovation, and the Nine Lives represent building blocks from which to fashion strategies to overcome the four challenges. Each requires a powerful antidote once you have developed a clear understanding of its source of power. The four basic challenges that must be overcome in order to enhance your innovation quotient are:

• DISTRACTIONS. The doubts and fears accumulated over a lifetime are there, in part, to keep us safe and secure. They are also a major distraction to those who would innovate. They can be a straightjacket preventing innovation. And the “noise” created by the clutter of life can drown out our thoughts and remove all the spaciousness so important to innovation.
• NORMAL . In order to survive as human beings, we are endowed with the ability to be normal. This means that we develop standard ways to approach life’s many challenges, from getting dressed in the morning to avoiding saber-tooth tigers on the way to work. Innovation requires getting outside the norms, and this is no small task given the amount of practice we have simply being normal.
• FAILURE. Even though failure is fundamental to learning, most of us grow up trying to avoid failure. To make progress, we must come to grips with the importance of failure in learning and innovation. To innovate, we must understand and at times even embrace failure.
• LEADERSHIP. Creativity is a quality that can’t be directed, coerced, or controlled as if it were an assigned location in the corporate parking lot. The challenge to leadership is to collaborate in the provision of a climate full of “natural energy.”

THE NINE LIVES OF INNOVATION

LIFE 1: CATS CREATE AN INNOVATION FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENT

There is a constant conversation going on in most minds that must be silenced in order to provide the spaciousness needed for innovation. Clutter also takes the form of distractions of this crazy world that seems to generate new distractions daily.

Many innovators, who have been asked where they first had the novel idea that led to their innovation, have identified the shower or the car. These places historically have been places of a relative calm nature where the mind is free of intense thought. When you let a phone violate the calm environment of a car, though has the potential to be a place of innovation, is lost.

Find ways to free yourself from the clutter that chokes your world. Begin to experience the spaciousness that allows your imagination to take flight. Identify pockets of serenity in empty rooms, out-of-the-way places and states of mind, and bring them into your life.

LIFE 2: CATS ARE PREPARED FOR INNOVATION

Innovation favors a prepared mind. The way you organize your experience in the warehouses we call memory can serve you well when it comes time to innovate.

Innovation favors a prepared mind. How prepared are you? Try this checklist!

• Learn creativity techniques through reading, seminars, and conferences.
• Build a network of innovators who will sharpen one another with wit and wisdom.
• Become affiliated with an association that promotes innovation so that you can tap into the latest resources and thinking. One such organization is the Innovation Network founded by Joyce Wycoff. Visit www.thinksmart.com. Another organization is a wonderfully creative group in Australia known as Mindwerx.
• Arrange your filing cabinets based on the laws of association, not linearity.
• Regularly view and simplify the mental structures you cultivate for the purpose of random access.

The more prepared you are, the more ready you are to seize an opportunity that comes your way before the rest of the pack, and the chances for you to achieve a breakthrough are greater.

 

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