Yesterday I talked with a group of leader for the morning at a retreat centre just outside Hermanus. The topic was innovation, creativity, and what there is to do once you have reached the last third of your career and your life.

After the three hour session, I told them how I would design an organisation if I could do it from scratch and asked them in return what they would do.

Not to my surprise, unfortunately, more than one answered how they would remove the current barriers. I understand why they answered like that, current obstacles in their organisations are massive, but that wasn’t the right answer. They were answering a different question.

It is easy to define what we do not want to build, it is a much more difficult and and better exercise to imagine what we do want to build. Defining ourselves, and our work, by what we and it is not will only get us so far.

Get skin in the game, go further.

Pierre

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