In the past, someone would either hire (or get hired) because of education, experience and the noted accomplishments of the person.
Not anymore.
If a company or organization wants to be extremely successful, it must hire using different criteria. What is the number one reason to hire people who hold important positions within any organization?
Their Ideas.
Companies can always find people to produce, to design, to manufacture, to distribute, to bill or to complete their assigned tasks. They cannot always find people who can come up with brilliant thinking. Or new ways of looking at old traditions. Or how to make customers more loyal. Ideas that will make production more efficient. Ideas that will make a business more successful. Ideas…that will turn a second-tier company into the absolute leader in their category.
Rodney Culver Hill who created the “World Future Society” wrote a paper titled ‘Creativity is the Currency of the New Millennium’, in it he stated:
”We are leaving the Knowledge Age and entering the Innovation Age where the students of today will experience more new inventions in their lifetime than all the discoveries from the beginning of recorded history to the present. We are on the crest of the wave of a tsunami of accelerating change!”
If you don’t hear at least once a week in the halls of your offices, within the walls of your warehouse or out in the field with your salesforce these two very important words: “What if…” then change is not a part of the future of your company.
Let me give you a few examples: “What if we delivered DVD’s to people’s homes?” (NETFLIX – the small company who took down Blockbuster Video) “What if we made our computer for the everyman? And, what if it was as simple to use as an appliance?” (STEVE JOBS – the man who built the highest valued company in the world) “What if our airline cost no more than taking the bus?” (SOUTHWEST – the Company that put the bus business out of business). “What if vacuum cleaners didn’t have to have bags?” (Dyson)
Ideas are the difference between a company simply moving forward and skyrocketing to greatness.
I will end this particular post with one of my favorite quotes: "A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on." - John F. Kennedy