By Doug Stephens<\/p>\n

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Over the last holiday shopping season, Amazon was clocking in 306 transactions per second<\/i>!<\/em>\u00a0 Photo app Instagram achieved a market value of 1 billion dollars in two years with a mere twelve employees.\u00a0 90% of the data that exists right now was created in the last two years and it’s estimated that soon, that world’s store of data could begin doubling every few hours. Just about everywhere we look we see more evidence that change is happening on an absolutely exponential scale.<\/p>\n

Some of this velocity and volume of change is a consequence of huge leaps in technology and the increasing connectedness of people and things. \u00a0And given the rate of the planet\u2019s population growth, some is just sheer math.\u00a0 The upshot is that change is no longer safe and incremental as it once was. \u00a0It’s volatile, risky and rapid.<\/p>\n

But how many meetings did you have at your company in the last month (or year for that matter) where the ideas being shared were so innovative they made you really uneasy?\u00a0 How many product or service creations came forward that were so radical that they worried you a little?\u00a0 How many failures were publicly celebrated by management for having moved the organization forward in its thinking?<\/p>\n

I speak to so many companies who claim innovation as their dominant competency and yet when I delve deeper into the construct and culture of most, I often find that in fact, risk aversion is what\u2019s really being rewarded.\u00a0 Completion, compliance and complicity are what get people ahead – no rocking the boat or running with scissors allowed.<\/p>\n

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“If an idea doesn’t make you feel a little uneasy, chances are it’s not really all that innovative.”<\/h2>\n

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I\u2019m also surprised at the number of companies that benchmark innovation vertically within their category or industry and fail to look outside to see the amazing things going on.\u00a0 The problem with this, as I’ve called out before<\/a><\/strong>, is that increasingly the real<\/em> competition in the market isn\u2019t your direct competitors but someone from outside who imagines a better way of doing what you do and builds it from scratch. \u00a0With ever lowering barriers to entry, these outsiders can be far more dangerous than any known competitor. \u00a0So, fixating on what your direct competitors are doing won’t inspire innovation, only stifle it.<\/p>\n

The net effect of these conditions for most organizations is incremental and almost imperceptible levels of change. Safe, subtle and linear \u2013 that\u2019s “change” in most organizations. And that is precisely why most organizations simply won\u2019t make it in the new era of consumerism.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

I look at it this way\u2026if the change happening outside your company is far more unsettling than the change happening inside it, you\u2019re not innovating at all.\u00a0 You\u2019re being left behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Doug Stephens   Over the last holiday shopping season, Amazon was clocking in 306 transactions per second!\u00a0 Photo app Instagram achieved a market value of [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1],"tags":[191,152,89,24,118,45,58],"class_list":["post-2841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","category-uncategorized","tag-amazon","tag-change","tag-innovation","tag-retail","tag-retail-prophet","tag-strategy-3","tag-technology"],"yoast_head":"\n