Guy Reams (00:00.846)
Today is day 217, Innovation Myopia, we're sitting on gold. In my experience, many people
and companies are unwittingly sitting on mounds of gold. Instead of recognizing this wealth, their gaze is fixed on some distant vista, an elusive ideal that they believe will yield great riches. They're oftentimes sitting right on top of a treasure. But this frequent oversight involves, you know, various elements. It could be a new business model they're working on, a new strategy, a new client type.
It could be a new go -to -market or a new technology they're working on. All of those things distract from the valuable assets the company already has. This morning, I found myself pondering a very interesting question. Why do leaders so often overlook what's so apparent to others?
As you might expect, the answer to that question is very complex. There's lots of influences and factors like cognitive bias, organizational culture, external pressures that obscure this clear vision. However, the one factor that I think stands out the most or at least has been in my personal experience is what is called innovation myopia. This borrows from the medical term of myopia or what we commonly refer to as nearsightedness.
This concept can be applied to the business realm and how leaders oftentimes prioritize short -term goals and specific solution details, missing the broader long -term implications. Innovative myopia is when leaders focus exclusively on new innovations rather than leveraging existing assets. They have a bias that the new innovative thing will be more valuable than what they currently have or what their currently strengths are.
Guy Reams (02:03.533)
I've been guilty of this myself many, many times. On several occasions, I've underestimated the strengths of the people in my own organization, and I've looked out to the market, and I saw if only I had talent like that, then I could be awesome. This thought is a rational thought. If you want to excel at some new innovation, then you gotta go hire new experts, new people.
But this approach is very rarely practical. Transforming an organization by introducing new innovations, hiring completely new people, is a massive undertaking that takes a lot longer than you think it's going to take. And the reason is, is because you're not the only one to come up with this idea. You're competing against a lot of other companies for that talent. This mindset of having this revelation that we need to go after some new innovation and get new people is a perfect example of innovation myopia.
The natural inclination is to believe that new personnel are needed to address new challenges. A better approach is to recognize the gold that you already possess. Often there's untapped talent within your existing team that can drive towards profitable growth. The talent may not align with today's leading trending innovations, but they could fulfill critical needs of a client base that are highly valued by lots of people.
Your current employees might just be the mountain of gold you're overlooking because you're so focused on the next innovation you don't realize it. Another area that I've seen missed is in the handling of data. We often admire companies that leverage data sets to uncover valuable new perspectives, approach to new markets, powerful insights that create revolutionary new strategies. We admire these. And so we get tunnel vision on trying to mimic that.
The problem with mimicking that all the time is it usually requires us to buy the data. We're not usually utilizing a native data set. We're actually buying somebody else's data to try to mimic an innovation thing we've seen.
Guy Reams (04:04.685)
So a lot of people will overlook the data that they have. The reason is because the data they have is usually very unstructured. It's not immediately comprehensible. Work has to be done to organize the data sensibly. But what a lot of people don't realize is the data they are collecting usually has a tremendously unique and powerful outlook when it comes to customer behavior or internal processes. That...
could be the gold you're ignoring. By innovation myopia, with innovation myopia, you're looking at what other people are doing with their data when you should be looking at what you can do with your data.
So I believe innovation myopia plays a major role in preventing executives from recognizing this treasure trove of gold, their own data. It's been there all the time. It just takes a little bit of work to extract it. So the concept of innovation myopia is critical barrier that many leaders I think should learn to navigate. I've had this problem. I've oftentimes been drawn to the innovation and, and,
That's not always bad, but sometimes pushing an organization to go after the innovation can come with perils because you're not ready yet, your team's not there yet, or you've got to strengthen something else that could be just as innovative. You would just take the time to realize what's in front of you. So I've learned to try to not sit on the mound of gold and stare off at some Vista somewhere, but rather look around what I have and see how can I use what I have.
to accomplish some objective. So this does take a strategic shift in perspective, learning to perceive what's in front of you and what you have, rather than trying to perceive what you don't have. And that's hard for us humans to do, because we're really good at identifying our gaps, aren't we? So anyway, hopefully you're not sitting on any mounds of gold. Hopefully you realize the value of the people and the data that you have. Thank you.