How To Turn On Shareholders
It's been a few billion pretty good years since
that fateful moment in a placid seaside tide pool
when the first amoeba sprang to life. Sure, the question of who invented Life As We Know It hung
up in court for eternity.
But, as we see it, that's no reason to deny dear
old Life its rightful place among Innovation's
Greatest Hits. Just above The Wheel and below
Room Service.
And if any holdout skeptics out there need
convincing of how big that moment was, just look
at how, try as we might, we can't seem to let go
of our aquatic origins. To this day, the mere sight
of still water sets the human imagination
racing. In that water, the goateed psychologist
sees a deep metaphor for our greatest
dreams and amdbitions. Your rebllious inner child
sees an invitation to skip a stone, shatter the
calm and defy gravity. And your primordial inner
goldfish sees home sweet watery home.
Now we could go delving into what still water means to the optimist, the pessimist and the mosquito. Buth these are impatient times so let's skip a stone to the end, to a group that responds to still water with no enthusiasm whatsoever. We refer, of course, to your shareholders. Those all-knowing market-movers who seem these days to get all hot and bothered only over that which is dynamic, moving, surging, creating, innovating. For whom still waters cost sleep.
Which is why, in this primordial soup, innovation is suddenly your best friend; provided, of course, you're not average at it. The frosty truth is that being
average at innovation means you fail at an eighty-five percent clip, take your sweet-assed time doing it,
burn cash like a runaway brush fire, and find
when you think you've cracked the code on market disruption that in truth you've barely made a ripple. If that's average, let's gaze across that placid tide pool and dream bigger.