If you’re a dreamer and idea person, you’re going to be in big demand if you can dream, develop, market, commercialize, and finally monetize the ideas. The critical point here is that coming up with the ideas is not good enough, the idea has to be commercial and also deployable.
With all this change, your employer’s or customer’s thinking goes something like this. Customers want a new product or an enhanced existing product. Who’s got the ideas, knows our core competencies, and has the abilities to exploit them? Answer: our employees – namely you.
So, the next frontier of new ideas is from us – people, employees, or contractors. Management consultants have coined a new term, ‘knowledge engineering’, to describe how organizations want to capture our inspiration, innovation, and invention. This may be another trend or fad – we’ll see in 2 years.
Companies are caught in a quandary. The company spent years satisfying one set of stakeholders, creditors and shareholders, to make the organization more efficient and productive. However, it was done at a huge cost, the loss of employee commitment. The company may have downsized, merged, changed working rules, developed new employer-employee contracts, or raised performance expectations.
Your employer or customer now wants to develop new disruptive products but needs your commitment, inspiration, and loyalty. Many of us already feel crunched having to do more with less. We’re now asked to commit and contribute to an organization that may have fired our best friend. No more! There’s a point of diminishing and finally no return when transformational survivors say ‘go figure’ when they’re asked to contribute their hearts and souls to an enterprise with ever changing rules and expectations.
Life Lesson Earned: Figure out what’s doable and right for your company, but focus and look out for #1.