Monday, March 3, 2008

John Kao on Innovation

This is SO WORTH an hour of your day - Robert Scoble interviewing John Kao about innovation. In fact, I may require every one of my students watch this. And suggest it be played at the Northern Short Course and the Southern Short Course.

Some quotes I pulled out of it:

People sometimes confuse creativity and innovation.


On General Motors and Detroit in general:

Change is hard. You have to drop a bomb on the complacency and mainstream culture of an established organization or you’re not going to get change. You cannot incrementally fix that kind of a problem ... They mistake cool marketing and cool concepts for genuine change

Without visionary leadership and a new narrative you’ve got nothing. But even then it’s dicey. It’s a constant blocking and tacking, it’s like fighting entropy, you have to keep doing it.


And my favorite:

We always have this invitation to invent the future we want.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi John,

Nice collection of meaningful quotes ... and seems to me the same things said of GM could apply to any established, dominant system from bureaucracies to business and energy to politics! And as a person working in community change - there's nothing more exciting that engaging in collectively creating the future -- today. Thx for the post.

schwerd said...

your support and enthusiasm is great....but it might be even more meaningful if you got his name right....it's Robert Scoble...not Richard....

Mark E. Johnson said...

Arghhh ... corrected, thanks. Everyone needs an editor.