Fearless Innovation

Conclusion: Business as Usual

Despite all the praise showered on innovation throughout these pages, make no mistake: I stand by what I wrote in the introduction: “innovation” is still an overused horrible buzzword (which, by the way, I use more than 850 times in this book). Over the years, how we perceive the term has changed, gotten lost, or been repackaged and rebranded in a way that causes confusion and anxiety or inspires eyerolls and chuckles. With all the skepticism and misconceptions, and the incorrect notions of what it means to “be innovative,” we’d probably all be a little happier if we could come up with another term and move on to the business at hand. In the future, maybe we can call it the “word that shall not be named” or, better yet, “business as usual,” since that’s really what we’re striving for here—making real innovation part of our everyday lives.

It also doesn’t actually matter what we call it. What matters is that once it’s woven into the fabric of an organization’s culture, it becomes so intuitive, so ever present and unidentifiable, that it needs no name at all. Remember, innovation is an attitude, a mindset, even an art, not a PR strategy or campaign slogan. It’s time that we treat it with the respect and reverence it deserves—because without it, we’re all screwed.

Similarly, we can refer to “change” as whatever we want. Call it “disruption”; call it “a new industrial revolution”; call it “progress,” “transformation,” or “the movement of hands along ...