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If I gave you everything you need to completely and absolutely celebrate your brilliance, would you come to the table?
If there was a way to see your genius come to life within a handful of small companies of which you might see a small share in each – would you come to play?
Here’s an invitation:
Let’s create a hand-picked group of individuals. Choose inventors, entrepreneurs, and VC’s who are insightful, wise, and influential among their peers. Let this group meet regularly, at their own cost, and give them just one thing: a tangible opportunity to be brilliant.
Take a mildly sophisticated due diligence process and use it to sort, sift, and identify potential commercial opportunities and matching technologies. Filter those opportunities by a set of criteria tailored to the interests and capacities of the group. When done, present sub-sets of related technologies to the hand-picked group and invite them to be inspired.
Invite inventors to create. Invite entrepreneurs to evolve concepts. Invite VCs to conceive companies. Ask inventors to prototype, ask entrepreneurs to commercialize, and ask VCs to start-up.
Invite and inspire brilliance.
Be brilliant
I want to do more of what I’m great at, don’t you? Doesn’t it feel amazing to dive into things where you know right down in your bones that you’re going to sing?
And don’t you meet people all the time who absolutely sing? I do. These people aren’t brilliant all over, but they’re radiant in some small way. Crazy smart scientists with bucket loads of patents on left-turning, hex-headed lugnuts. Wild-eyed inventors with piles of hand-made technological miracles buzzing in the workshop. Or walking calculators in starchy suits who see money in their sleep. Despite their diversity they all share this in common: a burning desire to be invited to be brilliant.
What if we flip the way we search for people – instead of looking for well-rounded, broadly capable professionals – what if we looked for highly specified players who have refined capacities that perfectly compliment other team members?
Instead of expecting technologists to also be CEOs, is there a way to let technologists focus on invention while someone else makes sure their stuff gets to market? Because most technologists who are CEOs don’t really care much about being CEOs, they really only care about seeing their stuff get used.
Why is this so rare in small, agile companies? Isn’t this a hockey team, or a rockstar, or Pulitzer prize winning writer? The models aren’t far-fetched, these people make good money (ok, maybe not the writer). Couldn’t we simply invite highly capable people (world-class business atheletes) to a table and let them play? There is something undeniable and intoxicating about an opportunity to completely unload in our areas of greatest capacity.
The reason this isn’t done is that it’s terribly risky. For every player, rocker, and writer there are a million at their heels who are dying to take their place. For every small company with a market crushing innovation, there are a million unseen, rusty prototypes.
So maybe a better question is: How do we invite brilliant people to try and fail quickly, over and over again, in very small ways?
How do we eat the risk? How do we create feeder teams for world-class, innovative companies?
Invoking innovation: moving beyond serendipity
Commentary
This is still my favorite one, Jeremy.
It’s as exciting to read now as it was during it’s genesis.
Actually, it may be more exciting now, as conditions for such frameworks improve.
Written by interfaced on
I am really interested in your post. You’re right on track with a lot of ideas here at THE MOVEMENT. I was going to make a more thought out comment, but I figure now is better than later.
How can we fail effectively and love what we do enough to pick up an start again. Can we create this environment for brilliance soon? We’ve been waiting.