The Five Personalities of Innovators: Which One Are You?

Here is an excerpt from another outstanding article featured by Forbes magazine’s website and written by Brenna Sniderman. To read the complete article,  check out other resources, sign up for free email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Whenever I try to conjure up what innovation looks like, the same slideshow of images clicks across my mind: that photo of Einstein with his tongue sticking out, Edison with his light bulb, Steve Jobs onstage in his black turtleneck, introducing the latest iThing. Unoriginal and overdone, to be sure. And not all that accurate.

Because it’s not just about that romantic “ah ha!” moment in front of a chalkboard or a cocktail napkin, it’s about the nitty-gritty work that comes after the idea:  getting it accepted and implemented. Who are these faces? And, most importantly, as I’m sure you’re all asking yourselves: where do I fit in?

Forbes Insights’ recent study, “Nurturing Europe’s Spirit of Enterprise: How Entrepreneurial Executives Mobilize Organizations to Innovate,” isolates and identifies five major personalities crucial to fostering a healthy atmosphere of innovation within an organization. Some are more entrepreneurial, and some more process-oriented – but all play a critical role in the process. To wit: thinkers need doers to get things done, and idealists need number crunchers to tether them to reality.

Though it may seem stymieing at times, in any healthy working environment, a tension between the risk-takers and the risk-averse must exist; otherwise, an organization tilts too far to one extreme or the other and either careens all over the place or moves nowhere at all. An effective and productive culture of innovation is like a good minestrone soup: it needs to have the right mix and balance of all the ingredients, otherwise it’s completely unsuccessful, unbalanced — and downright mushy.

The Forbes Insights study surveyed more than 1,200 executives in Europe across a range of topics and themes. Using a series of questions about their attitudes, beliefs, priorities and behaviors, coupled with a look at the external forces that can either foster – or desiccate – an innovative environment, a picture emerged of five key personality types the play a role in the innovation cycle.

This last piece – the corporate environment – is a stealth factor that can make or break the potential even the most innovative individual. Look at it this way: a blue whale is the largest animal known ever to have existed, but if you tried to put it in a freshwater lake, it wouldn’t survive. Well, that and it would displace a lot of water. My point? Even the largest and mightiest of creatures can’t thrive in an environment that doesn’t nurture them.

The themes surveyed in the study are universal; despite the focus on European executives, these personalities are applicable across oceans and cultures. The full study, available here, provides further breakdown of where these personality types congregate by industry, company size and job function.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which one fits you best . You may even see a little of yourself in more than one group.  But remember, none of these are bad. All play crucial roles in developing an idea, pushing it up the corporate channels, developing a strategy and overseeing execution and implementation. These are all pieces of a puzzle, arteries leading to the beating heart of corporate innovation. Wow – can I make that sound any more dramatic?

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Brenda then discusses each of the five personality types. To read the complete article, please click here.

As she explains, “I’m the Senior Director of Research at Forbes Insights. I’m most passionate about getting to the bottom of how (and why) things tick, and have focused on qualitative and quantitative primary research for over a decade. At Forbes, I research global trends among senior executives and organizations across any industry and topic you can imagine, from cloud computing, talent management and green technology to diversity, women leadership roles, retail financing and M&A trends. I received an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a master’s degree in strategic communications from Columbia University. Drop me a line at bsniderman@forbes.com, or follow me on Twitter at @brennasniderman.”

Putting Our Minds to Finding Work Solutions for The Under-Skilled May Be the Most Patriotic Thing We Can Do

For practically every family, the ingredients of poverty are part financial and part psychological, part personal and part societal, part past and part present.  Every problem magnifies the impact of the others, and all are so tightly interlocked that one reversal can produce a chain reaction with results far distant from the original cause.
If problems are interlocking, then so must solutions be.  A job alone is not enough.  Medical insurance alone is not enough.  Good housing alone is not enough.  Reliable transportation, careful family budgeting, effective parenting, effective schooling are not enough when each is achieved in isolation from the rest.  There is no single variable that can be altered to help working people move away from the edge of poverty.  Only where the full array of factors is attacked can America fulfill its promise.
The first step is to see the problems, and the first problem is the failure to see the people.
David Shipler:  The Working Poor  (Invisible in America)

How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled?
Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.
Barbara Ehrenreich:  Nickel and Dimed
 – On (Not) Getting By in America


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News item:  Non college graudates are seeign their job opportunites completely disappear.  From Do You Have a Job? by Daniel E. Slotnik:

For many young people in America, steady work is far from guaranteed. A new study shows that only one of six high school graduates is now employed full time, and although 73 percent think they will need more education, only half say they will enroll. Are you now employed? What jobs have you had in the past? Do you think you could find work after high school, if you choose not to attend college?

In her article “More Young Americans Out of High School Are Also Out of Work,” Catherine Rampell writes:
Whatever the sob stories about recent college graduates spinning their wheels as baristas or clerks, the situation for their less-educated peers is far worse, according to a report from the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University scheduled to be released on Wednesday.

Today is Urban Engagement Book Club day.  Twice a month, I present a synopsis of a book that deals with social justice or poverty at this event hosted by CitySquare.  This is one part of a multi-part life I am living.  On one day, I present a synopsis of a best selling and challenging business book.  On the next day, I present a synopsis of a book that deals with some aspect of human struggle, even human misery – books on social justice and poverty.  (I also do some presentation skills training; some keynote speaking, and a few other kinds of corporate-training-like activities).  I like everything that I do, and believe it is all useful to the folks that I interact with regularly.  I really do want to help people get “better” at what they do.

But it is the social justice part of my schedule that probably wins the “what matters most to you?” top spot.  I care about these issues deeply.  I’ve read too many books; I’ve read Isaiah and Amos from the Bible.  Caring about the neediest among us really is a big human deal.  To fail to do so makes us a little less human.

We all recognize these words, because they are so prominent in I Have a Dream by Dr. martin Luther King, Jr.:

Let justice roll on like a river,
 righteousness like a never-failing stream!

These words come from Amos 5, and here are a few of the other words that precede that famous “climax” in the chapter:

You levy a straw tax on the poor and impose a tax on their grain.
Therefore, though you have built stone mansions, you will not live in them; 
though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink their wine.
For I know how many are your offenses
 and how great your sins.
There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts…
Seek good, not evil.
Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts.

Caring for the poor; helping the cause of the poor; seeking and providing justice.  These may not be needed all that much by those with great means.  But as for the neediest…  these matter a great deal.  And the neediest among us seems to be a growing group at the moment.

Today’s book at the Urban Engagement Book Club is Family Properties:  Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America by Beryl Satter.  This is a book about a specific injustice, the “exploitation” of black people in Chicago.   But that story has been replicated in city after city.  This may be the key quote in the book:

When a seller in the black market demands exorbitant prices and onerous sales terms relative to the terms and prices available to white citizens for comparable housing, it cannot be stated that a dollar in the hands of a black man will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of a white man.

The book is really about how people with means find ways to make a lot of money – a lot of money — off of black people without the same level of means.  It is a story overflowing with racism.  But there is a warning in here for all folks.

I fear that we are in for much more of this kind of exploitation.  People with inadequate means is a growing demographic.  High school graduates (and those who did not graduate from high school – some 23-27% of all high school students) are simply unable to find work (see the news item above).  The situation is going to be increasingly dire.  And this book chronicles just how adept some folks are at making a lot of money off of the exploitation of the poor.  The poor black people were the victims in Chicago.  And such racially charged abuse is still present in far too many places.  But the plight of all types of people without adequate means is a story that I think we need to know, and give some serious thought to.

May I make a suggestion?  As we read business books, and as we think about improving our own business, and getting ahead financially – let’s not forget the needy among us.  And not just with an occasional charitable gift. Let’s give this issue some real attention.  Consider reading an occasional book that deals with such social justice issues.  (Start with the Shipler book, The Working Poor.  He is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and this book is honest, thorough, well-written).

Could anything help our country more than for all of us to set our minds to some solutions – to help create a better set of work possibilities for those now in such need, those without that college education to rely on?

It may be that the most patriotic thing any of us can do right now is to help the under-skilled and undereducated find work.

Off Balance: A book review by Bob Morris

Off Balance: Getting Beyond the Work-Life Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction
Matthew Kelly
Hudson Street Press/The Penguin Group (2011)

A paradox for our times: One’s career and personal life are separate…and inseparable

The work-life balance is an issue that has fascinated me for decades. Hence my interest in this book in which Matthew Kelly claims that, in fact, the work-life balance is a “myth” that people must “get beyond” to achieve their personal and professional satisfaction.” As he observes in the Introduction, “While the work-life balance discussion was introduced with the very best if intentions – namely, to help people deal with mounting pressures surrounding both personal and professional life in the modern world – in many ways the idea never had a chance because the term itself was fatally flawed.” Kelly believes that individual destiny and organizational destiny are “intertwined.” Yes, you can consider work life from personal life separately but they cannot be separated. What to do? Kelley wrote this book in response to that question.

These are a few of several dozen key points that caught my eye:

o  “I have come to the conclusion that people don’t really need or want balance.” Rather, they need and want “a satisfying experience of life.” (Page x)

o  “The crisis of the modern world is a crisis of ideas. Ideas shape our lives and the world. Thought determines action. It would not be too soon for us to learn that ideas have very real consequences.” (19)

o  “If it is to be sustained, our satisfaction has to be something that transcends external circumstances. It cannot be something that we put in the hands of things that are completely beyond our control.” (47)

o  “Continuous change is now an accepted part of life and business. The waves of change are constantly crashing on the shore of our lives, but it is a well-defined value structure that allows us to thrive in the midst of the change. It us the unchanging that allows us to make sense of the change.” (79)

o  “There are five facets to the process [of increasing the level of personal and professional satisfaction that we experience in our lives]: (1) Assessment, (2) Priorities, (3) Core Habits, (4) Weekly Strategy Session, and (5) Quarterly Review. All of these are interconnected and play either a macro or micro role within the overall process. To neglect one is to tamper with the system, which always leads the system to break down.” (107)

o  “The most important part of any system is accountability…I have noticed that most people can do something for a few days, or a few weeks, but over time they tend to slip back into old self-destructive ways. That’s why we need doctors, managers, parents, leaders, role models, and mentors.” (134)

The Personal and Professional Satisfaction System that Kelly explains and strongly recommends – indeed any system – can only provide a framework (albeit one that is to some extent self-correcting) and its effectiveness depends almost entirely by the person who adopts it and then applies it. Viewed as a journey, the process of increasing one’s level of personal and professional satisfaction is not automatic. Although the ultimate destination is certain, efforts to get there will encounter doubts, distractions, ambiguities, resistance (at least some of it self-generated), and temporary setbacks. The “balance” to which Kelly frequently refers evokes the image of a spinning gyroscope rather than an up-and-down see saw (or teeter totter) because its steady rotation is maintained amidst changes in location. A sturdy moral “compass” and a well-defined value structure ensure both proper balance and steady progress.

Years ago, Stephen Covey observed that people spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important. I agree and so does Matthew Kelley. “To lay your head on your pillow at night, knowing that who you are and what you do make sense…now, that is satisfaction.” We are also well-advised to recall advice from Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”