When we build a new company we start from a market need our company is going to give an answer to. Or, we get egoist. We start by thinking what kind of place our company is going to be.
Without the first approach we don’t even get our company start breathing. Without the second approach our company is not going to be breathing for a long time. Only if we build the right place, our company will be able to move from the first good idea that made everything start to the next one, and to the next one again and again.
So, short term we need a solution for our market, long term we need the environment that build solutions. This is what I was going around, when I remembered a video from TED that was shot May last year.
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, while talking about the role of play in creativity, provides some hints on why, building the right environment within a company is not easy. There’s a specific sentence he says that I find striking: “…if you want to build a design firm you probably also want to create a place where the people have <snip> the security to take risks”.
Well, this is true not just for design firms.
I’m getting bored about the idea that creativity and innovation is what we need to get out of the crisis. You can read it on any newspaper. But reality is that the crisis has made most of us focused on fact based decisions and ROI. Less interested in taking risks. We can see this pattern also in where people is investing money.
Let’s than put the 3 things together:
Fact based decision and a ROI with no risk taking looks boring but safe (financially). This, of course if we don’t care about the enviroment we’re going to build. No risk taking is going to make our company not capable to move to the next solution.
