Revolutionary Insight on Innovation Provided at the CIO Summit and CNP Expo
Inspiring innovation and challenging the status quo are primary goals for many business owners. However, putting those objectives into practice can be difficult.
I recently attended two different industry events, both of which challenged my outlook on innovation, why it’s important, and how we can incorporate it into our daily lives.
I’d like to take a minute to reflect on the Chief Innovation Officer Summit and the CNP Expo and share some of the insights I’ve gleaned regarding our approach to business.
Forward-Thinking Executives at the CIO Summit
The CIO Summit amassed an inspiring group of high-profile executives and noted thought leaders. I had the privilege of learning from James Harris (Google), Janice Burns (MasterCard), David Bartlett (GE Aviation) and Hao Dinh (GE Power).
One of my favorite sessions was with the CTO of Capital One Labs, Mike Fulkerson. His presentation was not just witty, spot-on and insightful, but it was totally relatable to a lot of my experiences. It almost felt as if he’d spent time in our own organization and witnessed our struggles first-hand.
I find that, not unlike most other fast-growing fin-tech companies, we are trying to strike a constant balance between typical office organization and an acceptable level of mayhem. With the market changing so rapidly, it’s necessary to be supremely agile and dynamic in order to stay effective.
Mike explained that there are two divergent business models.
- The new-age model forsakes traditional management, corporate structure and fancy titles.
- Oldschool structures rely on stiff hierarchy and adherence to traditional corporate customs.
I really appreciated that Mike has a down-to-earth, realistic approach to organization, recognizing that businesses need to embrace elements of both models in order to thrive.
Rising to the Challenges of eCommerce at the CNP Expo
Charles Duhigg’s keynote address at the CNP Expo was one of the most well thought-out arguments for innovation. Charles’s real-world examples and case studies made his theories come to life.
He really hit the nail on the head when describing productivity. As Charles put it, truly productive people don’t just change their environment, they change their mindset.
Charles emphasized the distinction between ‘busy’ people and ‘productive’ people, because simply being busy doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily achieving anything. His idea of productivity involves three elements: innovation, focus and managing teams.
- Innovation is about reimagining things. It’s based on taking old ideas and seeing them in a new way.
- Focus is training your attention on the relevant details, while blocking out the unproductive elements that will threaten to derail you.
- Managing teams effectively means facilitating interactions that encourage everyone to be involved to draw on the widest pool of opinions and perspectives.
I love Charles’ way of conceptualizing productivity. It’s not about how much you’re doing, but how much you’re achieving that really matters.
Redefining Corporate Culture
When it comes to corporate structure, I intrinsically work off a flat model. For example, we all gather around for a quick standing meeting every day, and it seems like my primary role is to constantly address our evolving organizational chart.
For me, the CIO Summit was an affirming experience. It’s encouraging to learn that leadership and organizational challenges are not exclusive to our company. While all situations are different, everyone confronts similar issues. This is especially true now that agility has become an essential element to successful workplaces.
The market evolves constantly, and the associated evolution of corporate culture continues to challenge our traditional understanding of business organization. Every day, innovators break another long-standing rule that we always just took for granted. To demonstrate, just look at Chargebacks911. When everyone assumed that there was little, if anything, that merchants could do about chargebacks, we came along and offered a solution that totally disrupted the payments environment with new strategies.
Success demands that you be willing to challenge what you thought you knew and reevaluate what you thought was right before you can capitalize on the potential of what you can become. For me, I think the most valuable takeaway from both the CIO Summit and the CNP Expo was that we can never lose sight of the need to innovate.
That means not just breaking the rules, but throwing them out the window!
