Some will say hard work is what gets you your success. Some will say luck is essential as well as hard work. What say you?

Angeline Lim

Tactical, Multilingual, Creative, Imaginative, Haiku-lover.

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

Business Innovations – Where do they come from?

Do innovations come from consumers as a demand or generated from within the company?
Surely a both, but I want to hear your opinion.

How important is it to know if an innovation is push or pull?

Gianluigi Cuccureddu

Consultant ? Marketing Strategist ? Venture Advisor

Innovation can come from any source. So it’s important to be listening and positioned to act when an opportunity arises.

Most often, an innovation will come from someone not accepting the status quo and, instead, finding an alternative solution. So it also helps to encourage rather than discourage the typical “trouble makers” and try to funnel the energy and discontent into coming up with solutions or alternatives. Problem customers, employees and vendors are usually experiencing something that they perceive as an issue with you or your company. Open feedback can often lead to innovation. If anyone has ever said “that’s really dumb”, you have a performance improvement opportunity.

Mistakes and errors are another great source for innovation ideas. Even when it’s human error, there’s often an opportunity to improve a process or even find a radically new (and hopefully, better) way of doing things.

As for identifying push or pull innovations, the main benefit of identifying a pull is that you have an opportunity to capitalize on the fact that you listen and respond to your customers and/or partners. It’s a great PR opportunity and encourages additional feedback from outside. Pulls also tend to have a more direct impact on your sales, marketing and customer loyalty. Innovation from within has a greater impact on employee morale and internal efficiencies, but may never translate to any customer impact. So, I beleive that the distinction is an important one but that they’re both valuable sources to develop.

Just my opinion, of course.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” – Seneca

How do you engage a prospect who originally tells you, “I’m not interested”?

I often run into prospects who at first tell me they don’t have an interest or a need… but once I get them talking… it’s a whole different story. Sometimes, they turn into my best clients! How do you engage a prospect who originally tells you, “I’m not interested”?

Doyle Slayton

Sales & Leadership Strategist – SalesBlogcast.com Professional Speaker | Author | Social Media | Web 2.0 | TopLinked.com

Turn it into an opportunity for them to be the expert. Ask them if you can buy them lunch and pick their brains to help refine your approach for the next customer (be careful about walking the line between listening and selling). Get them talking. Ask lots of questions. Try to demonstrate knowledge and insight by asking the *right* questions and try to be complimentary about the things that seem innovative or well executed. If it’s relevant, talk about what you or your other clients have done that might be helpful (but not in the context of a sale. This is a “meeting of minds” and not a sales pitch) People love to be the experts and the valued for their knowledge (just look at Linkedin 🙂 A lot of people also react positively to the “Help me, Obi-Wan!” approach that they’re in a unique situation to be able to save you. If you also get someone who’s passionate about their business, you’ll develop a bond and rapport through this approach that you’ll never get by trying to directly sell to them. At the end of the session, *don’t go in for the kill*!!!!! If they perceive it as a sales pitch, you’re dead. Just thank them profusely, ask if they have any additional leads and try to keep the door open for followups. Then look for opportunities to hook up again (a new product or service offering, some new set of questions or ideas, etc.) Treat it as networking rather than sales and build your reputation with the client before jumping back in for the sale. It’s more difficult once you got the “Not Interested”, but it’s certainly not impossible

What has been the role of chance in your professional life?

Each one of us plays a fundamental role in building a dreamed state of affairs about what we want for our future professional life. In fulfilling this goal, most of us assume a long and hard learning process where continuous exposure to new knowledge, experiences, other professional and new information have profound and irreversible repercussions over our professional life.

In many circumstances, random facts and unexpected things may happen and our vision of the desired state of affairs is then distorted, blurred and in some circumstances, this vision may suffer from profound transformations that determine a new future state of affairs and a new reality ostensibly different from our dreamed vision.

What has been the role that random and unexpected facts have played in your professional life?. At what extent is possible that one may control the power and influence of chance over our professional life?

As always your responses are welcome and well appreciated.
Octavio

Octavio Ballesta

Global Thinker ? Corporate Strategist with Operational Master Plan

There’s an old saying that “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”.

I, personally, beleive that “lucky” people are the ones that expose themselves to situations where opportunities might arise, see the opportunities and ensure that they’re in a position to take advantage of opportunities when they come along. From that perspective, you’re almost entirely in control.

Unlucky people tend to be the ones who are unprepared to deal with risks and often have their lives built on a very precarious set of assumptions. (“This job is going to last forever”, “I can carry debt forever”, “I don’t need to take care of my health”, etc.) and one chance event can bring the whole structure tumbling down. “Lucky” people take the hit, recover and try to move on.

Probability and chance still play a part. But, as a friend of mine used to say, you’ll never catch a fish from your living room. Put yourself out there, place yourself in situations and among people who are most likely to present the opportunities and you’ll find that your “luck” increases exponentially.

Hope for the best outcomes and pursue opportunities as if they’re already realities, but be prepared for the worst.

“I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” – Thomas Jefferson

Good Luck 🙂

Picture the Monday morning meeting that you have to attend after coming back from Symposium. It’s you and your CIO and SVPs. The Topic: What is one innovative/mind blowing idea should we (WE MUST!) start doing/implementing now.

For years we’ve heard about such topics as Real-Time Infrastructure, Server Virtualization, VOIP, Service-Oriented IT, ITIL and others.

I would submit that these topics are NOT innovative. To borrow a term, these topics are “birthright services” for I&O.

For some companies there are significant benefits to be gained by improving their implementation of some of these topics but you are not success in today’s game if you’re not doing this stuff! Every CIO has heard (heard the words but maybe not gotten the message) about these topics. Rehashing these same themes is not going to make an impact.

What’s innovative these days?

(Question from “capstick” on the Gartner Symposium Forums)

Honestly, I don’t believe that there’s anything really new. But there are a lot of “old” opportunities that a lot of IT groups aren’t exploiting.

The biggest one that I can think of is true collaboration with the business and a sense of partnership at all levels of the business and IT. At the top, that includes making sure that IT has a seat at the table. There needs to be a continuous dialog concerning what opportunities the business has and how IT can help to exploit them. Tools that provide the visibility (both ways) and facilitates that communication are part of that. But the behavior is the most important thing. Everything else is just an optimization exercise to squeeze out more work at less cost.

There are a few “game changing” technologies, but the real Innovation comes from process and culture changes, not from the tools themselves. IT should be a facilitator of Innovation and should be engaging the business to find the application and business value in the tools. To do that, we need to get out of the commoditization mindset and back into one of business partnership.