Business Intelligence Success Factors: Tools for Aligning Your Business in the Global Economy

CHAPTER 5

Innovation

Like water flowing from an underground spring, human creativity is the wellspring greening the desert of toil and effort, and much of what stifles us in the workplace is the immense unconscious effort on the part of individuals and organizations alike to dam its flow.¹

 

—DAVID WHYTE, THE HEART AROUSED

 

The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind—the computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people—artists, investors, designer, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.

 

—DANIEL PINK, A WHOLE NEW MIND

 

While many organizations are still immersed in the Information Age, there is both an economic pull and a human yearning to move beyond the logical, linear, reductionist view to a more compassionate, inventive, holistic view. The economic pull stems from the business realities of a flattening world described in Chapter 1. Increasingly, the linear, process-oriented work is being automated or shipped overseas. And greed has undermined many legitimate business ventures. The human yearning stems from an experience of material abundance leading to a deeper yearning for nonmaterial riches. According to ...