What Can Innovation Do to Your Life by Emulating the Traits of Charismatic Leaders?

Charismatic leaders have a preternatural way of creating great ideas, structures, and organizations from pure imagination.  Alexander the Great is said to have begun crafting his epic life after reading Homer’s “Iliad.” Innovation merely means exploring the possibilities of a fantasy by which you bring to reality.  It's a talent that everyone has, yet they think they don't.  If you've ever marveled at somebody's creative prowess, guess what, you can create and innovate too. It just takes time. Everyone is born creative. The box of crayons in kindergarten was not limited to those who possessed potential; because the truth is, everybody has potential.  You know how long it took to learn to ride a bike or drive a car? It's the same with innovation. It takes a bit of practice and a lot of time before this skill set becomes easy. This article will teach you a few tips on how to bring innovation into your life.

Don't listen to what other people say. Follow the beat of your own drum. Allowing for the input of other people will only bring cacophony to the music you are trying to make. If you have an original idea, don't waste your time and effort trying to make people understand. They won't.  And the help you will probably get comes in the form of negative feedback. If all those geniuses listened to their peers, we would probably still be living in the middle ages.

Spend time on it. I cannot stress that enough, although, please do not mistake this tip to tell you to quit your day job entirely. Do not. This involves some tricky time management but with a little discipline you'll be able to squeeze both in. 

Exercise. Take a walk. Run a mile or two. Send all those endorphins coursing through your veins. Exercising certainly clears and relaxes your mind and allows for anything to pop up. 

Record your dreams.  Aren't some of your dreams just the craziest things that your conscious mind would never have thought of? If you've had these dreams before, and I'm sure you have, this only shows you the untapped innovative power you have lying within. So jot down those notes. Those dreams may just create an innovative spark in you.

Find your own style. You can always tell a Van Gogh from a Matisse. You'll know Hemingway wrote something by the choice of words on the paper. So it is the same with you. People will appreciate your innovation more because it is uniquely yours and that no one else would have thought of what you were thinking. That will let people see how valuable an asset you are. 

Don't hide behind pretty gadgets or tools. You don't need the most expensive set of paints to produce a masterpiece. The same way with writing. You don't need some expensive fountain pen and really smooth paper for a bestseller. In fact, J.K. Rowling wrote the first book of the Harry Potter Series on bits of tissue. So what if you've got an expensive SLR camera if you're a crappy photographer? Who cares if you've got a blinging laptop if you can't write at all? The artist actually reduces the number of tools he has as he gets better at his craft; he knows what works and what doesn't. 

Nothing will work without passion. What wakes you up in the mornings? What keeps the flame burning? What is the one thing that you'll die if you don't do? Sometimes people with talent are overtaken by the people who want it more. Think the hare and the tortoise. Ellen DeGeneres once said that if you're not doing something that you want to do, then you don't really want to do it. And that's true. Sometimes you just want something so bad you become virtually unstoppable. And that is passion. Passion will keep you going. 

Don't worry about inspiration. You can't force it; inspiration hits when you least expect it to, for those unpredictable yet inevitable moments you should prepare. An idea could strike you on the subway, yet alas, you poor unfortunate soul; you have no sheet of paper to scribble down a thought that could change the world. Avoid these disasters. Have a pen and paper within your arm's reach at all times.

Charismatic leaders inspire innovation, but you can duplicate the same process.  Keep in mind that you're doing these things for your own satisfaction and not anyone else's. But soon enough they will notice and everything should snowball from there. As Shakespeare once noted, “The fault of man lies not in our stars,… but in ourselves.”

To develop the innovative skills of charismatic leaders, visit: Charisma

For Charismatic Leaders, Innovation Is a State of Mind

Charismatic leaders are known for creating great visions and innovations seemingly out of thin air.  You probably know the myth of innovation as a sudden flash of insight that comes from nowhere. We read about that "aha" moment or that light bulb turning on in the mind of some inventor or innovator. This is true to a certain extent. Einstein really did get flashes of insight while shaving in the morning.  However, he was of course working on the particular problems he had insight into and he didn't suddenly have ideas for new kitchen gadgets or movie plots.

 

Einstein’s innovations, in other words, no matter how "sudden" the original ideas were, came from past and present mental work. It is like a singer who works at his craft for ten years and then becomes an "overnight success." Innovative people only have "sudden" new ideas because they have habitually worked and thought in certain ways for some time. If you want to become an innovative thinker, why not start cultivating those mental habits?

Mental Habits Lead To Innovation

Problems can be opportunities.  A "Problem" may have a negative connotations, such as being a hassle or stressful, but any problem can lead to an innovation that improves our lives. Not knowing the time led to clocks small enough to put on our wrists. Nasty diseases lead to sanitary sewer systems. Start looking for opportunity in every problem. Even a mundane problem like not having enough storage space could lead to a new innovation. You may just build a plywood floor in the attic, but you could invent a new type of outdoor storage unit.

Innovation begins with understanding the key elements. Metal, wood, and glass are not key elements of a door to an innovator. A way to get in, a way to keep others out - these are key elements. Begin with these and soon you're imagining new ways to make a door. You could design a door that is opened by your voice (nice when your hands are full) or one that shuts and locks itself when anyone else approaches. Think of the key elements in things.

Attitude helps innovation. The creative problem-solving technique of concept-combination involves combining two ideas to see what new idea or product results. The crucial point is that you assume there will be a useful new idea. Starting with that assumption, your mind will work overtime to produce something.  A shoe and a CD have nothing to do with each other, but it took just a minute to imagine a CD player with headphones that only plays the music correctly if a jogger maintains his ideal pace. When you assume there is something there you'll often find something.

Playfulness helps innovation. A playful mind is a creative mind and while high IQ doesn't correlate with creativity, put it together with playfulness, and you have an Einstein. Remember, he imagined himself riding on a beam of light in order to arrive at his theory of relativity. Why not start playing with ideas and things in your mind and in your surroundings.  Innovation should be fun and an excellent way of doing good while doing well.

To develop the leadership traits of innovators, visit: Charisma

Innovation: The Life Blood Of Your Business

The Charismatic Leadership model is often credited for developing great innovations and If you’re running or managing a business and want it to be around for a long time, you need to spend a good part of your time innovating. That’s because, in a fast-moving world, where people expect things to get better and better, and cheaper and cheaper, innovation is your route to getting ahead of your competition.

Here are 7 ways to put new life blood into your organization through innovation.

1. Create An Innovative Climate. Goran Ekvall of Lund University in Sweden has defined three conditions needed for a climate of innovation. They are: trust, dynamism, and humor. One of Ekvall’s case studies was a Swedish newspaper where the team working on the women’s section consistently outperformed all the other teams. The reason? Quite simply, this group trusted one another, had a high level of energy and shared a common sense of humor.

2. Develop Washing-Up Creativity. According to the Roffey Park Management Institute, most flashes of inspiration come to people when they are away from work and not forcing their conscious brains to find solutions to their problems. For some, ideas come while mowing the lawn or taking the dog for a walk or playing golf or waiting on a railway station. For Isaac Newton, it was an apple on the head while sitting in the garden. For Archimedes, it was in the bath. For others, it’s while doing the dishes; that’s why Roffey Park calls these flashes of insight: “washing-up creativity”.

3. Make New Connections. Making new connections between existing features of your product or service is a popular way to innovate. Akio Morita, chairman of Sony, said that he invented the Walkman because he wanted to listen to music while walking between shots on his golf course. His team simply put together two seemingly incompatible products: a tape recorder and a transistor radio.

4. Find Out What People Need. Necessity is a great spur to innovation. Take, for example, writing paper. The Chinese had already made paper from rags around the year 100 BC but because there was no need for it, nothing came of it. When it did reach Europe in the Middle Ages, when writing was all the rage, the supply of rags and worn-out fabric soon dried up. That’s when a French naturalist made the discovery that wasps made their nests by chewing wood into a mash that dried in thin layers. Within 100 years, all paper was made using the idea of wood pulp.

5. Test, Test, Test. Product testing is the way most inventors and organizations go about innovation. It may not be the quickest route to success, but it is often the surest. Jonas Salk, for example, discovered the polio vaccine by spending most of his time testing and testing and continually finding out what didn’t work. Thomas Edison, the inventor of the filament light bulb, recorded 1300 experiments that were complete failures. But he was able to keep going because, as he said, he knew 1300 ways that it wasn’t going to work.

6. Adopt and Adapt. One relatively easy approach to innovation is to notice how others deal with problems and then adapt their solutions to your own. It’s known as “adapt and adopt”. It’s what watchmakers Swatch did when they realized that the more reliable their watches became, the less people needed to replace them. Their solution? Borrow an idea from the world of fashion and collections by turning their watches into desirable fashion accessories. Now people buy Swatch watches not just to tell the time but because it’s cool to do so.

7. Take Lessons From Nature. If you really want to be inventive, you can’t beat nature. The world of nature gives us an endless supply of prototypes to use in our own world. Take Velcro, for example. Velcro was patented by Georges de Mestral in 1950 after he returned from a hunting trip covered in tiny burrs that had attached themselves to his clothing by tiny overlapping hooks. De Mestral quickly realized that here was an ideal technique to fasten material together. A whole new way of doing things was suddenly invented.

The history of the world is the history of innovation. Thomas Kuhn called each acceptance of a new innovation a “paradigm shift”. For once a new innovation becomes accepted, the world has changed forever and can never go back to the way it was.

For more information on developing the skills for becoming an innovator, visit: Charisma

How to Become an Icon

Inherently, most products and services strive to become icons. No one really wants to spend the rest of his or her life attempting to convince individuals of the merit surrounding an idea. Detergent X is better for clothes because it not only gets the dirt out, it restores clothing to its original luster. If Detergent X can take on iconic or mythic meaning, than Detergent B does not stand a chance. Detergent B is not only challenging a product, but a way of life. Imagine you or your product being a way of life. Most people, products or services never become icons because there are certain criteria necessary to graduate to this level. The same notion is applied for graduating from Star to Superstar to Megastar to Legend.

Legendary status qualifies for becoming an icon. Becoming an icon is a process requiring a concerted effort with relentless determination. Establishing icon status requires certain steps to be achieved, which require:

Revolutionizing/changing the thinking of a particular idea, product or service-- It isn't the "me-too" mentality that brings about revolutions, but the "never been done before" mentality. If you see voids within your industry that experts say are necessary, you have just embarked on an opportunity for innovation. What opportunities exist to expand worldviews or differentiate a product or service being offered? Answers to this question, brings forth watershed events. It is much more challenging to revolutionize an industry than it is to follow the status quo. Largely, complacency and mediocrity are the nemesis to becoming an icon.

Capturing imaginations through constant and consistent imagery--Quite often, you may capture the imagination of individuals through graphic depiction or acute profundity. In other words, you get their attention through the pictures you create from the words you utter! Once the mind has been elevated, it creates perceptions from stimuli that stretches and ultimately influences thought and behavior. If you can spark the imagination of others to see the world from your viewpoint, you can impact behavior, which enhances iconic status.

Maintaining innovation over a long period of time--Longevity is the hallmark for becoming an icon. "Quick buck artists" and "Overnight sensations" are not the model for icons. It is a long, arduous process that withstands the test of time. While there is no set time, icons usually span two or more generations. Each generation is influenced differently, because the icon evolves to reflect the relevancy of that age group. While the icon may curtail its innovation, its track record is sufficient to draw on for an indeterminate amount of time. An icon often has enough reserves to continue to influence generations to come.

Creating stories and fables around exploits-- Icons take on mythological forms by the aura created around them. Fables are created out of real life triumphs that become bigger than life when sparked by the imagination. Many great stories are based on some truth that becomes legendary though exaggerated repetition. What was once a simple act of perseverance takes on epic proportions of insurmountable feats. Every icon has a story of trial, defeat and final triumph that encapsulates the human spirit.

At the height of frenzy, become elusive and inaccessible--Humans as icons often stay in the limelight too long. The iconic idea is that of a good performance--always leave audiences wanting more! An icon preserves a memory as he or she preserves an image. It is essential to exit or become elusive while still on top. Once you stay too long and human frailties emerge, the icon diminishes. By becoming elusive and inaccessible, the crowd craves you more when all that's left are the innovations, images and stories.

Becoming an icon requires a concerted effort steeped in relentless determination. The scarcity of icons is not because of its impossibility. The scarcity exists due to the time, dedication and energy needed to excel to such a level. A life committed to an undying desire to achieve the ultimate within an industry is open to all.

For more information, visit: Charisma