Have you ever been at a cocktail party, had someone ask you what you do for a living, and wished you could come up with something impressive-sounding to wow them? Adam Stelztner probably never experiences that. He's an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has worked on flight missions including Galileo, Cassini, and Mars Pathfinder, and the Mars Exploration Rover project. He has a lot to say about innovation and leadership.
The ugly truth is that great work isn’t enough. No one tells you this early in your career; It’s something you learn over time. Cream doesn’t automatically rise to the top, and we don’t live in a meritocracy. If you want your idea to be heard, you have to go the extra mile to ensure that it’s framed to resonate with the right audience.
In the effort to "ship fast" we often fail to lay a sturdy foundation for our work, and the results can be disastrous. Shipping early shouldn't be equivalent to thoughtlessness. You need to ensure that you are respecting the work by giving it your best mental effort.
Yes…we need coaches. However, don’t be “The Coach”. Instead, offer feedback that is timely, contextualized, empathetic, and helpful in the context of the outcome you’re committed to.
While meetings can go bad in an endless variety of ways, one thing is common to all bad meetings: they’re a colossal waste of time. Sadly, if a typical month includes a number of meetings, this wasted time amounts to a massive chunk of our lives! We need a solution.
To be valuable and effective you need to understand which kind of innovator you are.
No one is going to beat a path to your door. Share your ideas, fight for them, and do whatever you need to in order to ensure that your work gets a fair audience.
Workloads and expectations are increasing. It’s not a cliché, it’s a fact. How will you deal with it?
There’s an often cited principle about creativity that states “there’s no such thing as a bad idea.” It’s wrong. There are bad ideas - terrible ones - and they can explode and destroy the vibe of a meeting or project if not dealt with swiftly and decisively.
Healthy people, and healthy teams, stoop over to re-claim what is valuable, even when it's inconvenient.
How to deal with frustration in the workplace.
Contrary to popular belief, healthy competition can be a good thing.
How to prevent a culture of blame from eroding trust and causing sub-par work.
Surrounding yourself with the right people can help you do your best creative work.
Diffusing the struggle between possibilities and pragmatics.
I gave my Possibility Thinking talk at a conference yesterday. It's always fun meeting new people, especially in industries I don't frequent or have much opportunity to engage with, and hearing the challenges and opportunities they're facing. Surprisingly (or...
There is a point at which staring at a problem and simply cranking away yields diminishing returns. The solution isn't to continue to knuckle-down and hope to dig out of the hole using the same methods that created it. It's to establish traction, and hopefully...
When everyone is responsible for something, no one is. Creative teams need to make sure that there are specific goals, metrics and accountability for creative work. Don't fall prey to the "fly in the middle of the room" mindset.
There's something that's been eating at me lately and I'm trying to work my way to the bottom of it. There's a lot of buzz within organizations that perceive themselves as creative-friendly about fostering a "safe environment" for ideas to flourish. I agree, and...
One of the frustrating aspects of creating for a living is that we are often responsible for executing our own ideas. Over time, this can cause us to self-limit because, subconsciously, we don’t want to generate an idea that we’ll have to find the time and energy...