"here's the unshakeable fact: you don't get to tomorrow by solving yesterday's problems."
What old problems are we trying to solve in "library land" that are really a waste of our time and what new problems should we be focusing our attention on instead?
I am including the opening section here but please take a few minutes and read the entire article - the link is at the bottom.
If You Were the Next Steve Jobs...
...what problems would you try to solve?
Let me answer that by telling you a story.
Every writer will tell you: first, find a good café. And while I was hunched over my laptop in one my favorite tiny cafes in London — the estimable Kaffeine, purveyors of some of the best coffee I've had the privilege to have — something tiny, yet remarkable, happened.
After a few days, James, the barista, noticed that I'd come in, order a flat white, write like a man possessed for an hour or so — but never finish my coffee. He asked me why, and I replied that I espresso leaves me too wired to write, but paradoxically, I always need a little. Without missing a beat, James simply proceeded to create an entirely new drink for me, on the spot: a mini flat-white, which he half-jokingly named after me.
Now, this might sound entirely trivial. Until you ask yourself: how often, despite billions spent on "service," "creativity," "innovation," "changing the game," "motivation," "leadership," and assorted other magical buzzword-incantations, has something like the preceding happened to you, anywhere — ever? My bet is: outside of a truly excellent bar, almost nowhere, probably never.
Imagine, for a moment, that you (yes, you) were the next Steve Jobs: what would your (real) challenges be? I'd bet they wouldn't be scale (just call FoxConn), efficiency (call FoxConn's consultants), short-term profitability (call FoxConn's consultants' bankers), or even "growth" (call FoxConn's consultants' bankers' lobbyists). Those are the problems of yesterday — and today, here's the thing: we largely know how to solve them.
Whether you're an assiduous manager, a chin-stroking economist, a superstar footballer, or a rumpled artist, here's the unshakeable fact: you don't get to tomorrow by solving yesterday's problems.
To solve today's set of burning problems, you just might have to build new institutions, capable of handling stuff a little something like this...
Let me answer that by telling you a story.
Every writer will tell you: first, find a good café. And while I was hunched over my laptop in one my favorite tiny cafes in London — the estimable Kaffeine, purveyors of some of the best coffee I've had the privilege to have — something tiny, yet remarkable, happened.
After a few days, James, the barista, noticed that I'd come in, order a flat white, write like a man possessed for an hour or so — but never finish my coffee. He asked me why, and I replied that I espresso leaves me too wired to write, but paradoxically, I always need a little. Without missing a beat, James simply proceeded to create an entirely new drink for me, on the spot: a mini flat-white, which he half-jokingly named after me.
Now, this might sound entirely trivial. Until you ask yourself: how often, despite billions spent on "service," "creativity," "innovation," "changing the game," "motivation," "leadership," and assorted other magical buzzword-incantations, has something like the preceding happened to you, anywhere — ever? My bet is: outside of a truly excellent bar, almost nowhere, probably never.
Imagine, for a moment, that you (yes, you) were the next Steve Jobs: what would your (real) challenges be? I'd bet they wouldn't be scale (just call FoxConn), efficiency (call FoxConn's consultants), short-term profitability (call FoxConn's consultants' bankers), or even "growth" (call FoxConn's consultants' bankers' lobbyists). Those are the problems of yesterday — and today, here's the thing: we largely know how to solve them.
Whether you're an assiduous manager, a chin-stroking economist, a superstar footballer, or a rumpled artist, here's the unshakeable fact: you don't get to tomorrow by solving yesterday's problems.
To solve today's set of burning problems, you just might have to build new institutions, capable of handling stuff a little something like this...
read the whole article here -
http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2012/09/if_you_were_the_next_steve_job.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
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