Great Innovators Create the Future, Manage the Present, and Selectively Forget the Past

For a long time, I have been troubled to see how often organizations fail to invest wisely in their futures while instead placing dominant emphasis on the present. To be sure, the present is vitally important. Your current business is the performance engine. It both funds day-to-day operations and generates profits for the future. Where problems arise is when the present crowds out other strategic priorities—for example, when the only skills brought into a business are those that serve today’s core. That is shortsighted in every sense of the word. What’s missing from the managerial toolkit is a way for managers to allocate their—and their organization’s—time and attention and resources on a day-to-day basis across the competing demands of managing today’s requirements and tomorrow’s possibilities. But as anyone who has ever tried to lead innovation knows, the challenge goes beyond being ambidextrous enough to manage today’s business while creating tomorrow’s. There is a third, and even more intractable, problem: letting go of yesterday’s values and beliefs that keep the company stuck in the past. To deal with this problem, over the course of thirty-five years of working with and doing research in corporations around the world, I have developed a simple, practical framework that recognizes all three competing challenges managers face when leading innovation. It is based on the simple idea that the future is not located on some far-off horizon, and you cannot postpone the work of building it until tomorrow. To get to the future, you must build it day by day. That means being able to selectively set aside certain beliefs, assumptions, and practices created in and by the past that would otherwise become a rock wall between your business of today and its future potential. This is the basic idea behind what I call the Three- Box Solution (see the figure below). 

Success in each box requires a different set of skills, attitudes, practices, and leadership. By balancing the activities and behaviors associated with each box, every day, your organization will be inventing the future as a steady process over time, rather than as a onetime, cataclysmic, do-or-die event. Simply put, the future is shaped by what you do, and don’t do, today.

The three-box framework will help you deliver stronger overall performance and moreinnovative futures while also building an organization fit to survive not just from quarter to quarter but for generations. As Karim Tabbouche, the chief strategy officer of VIVA Bahrain, told me: “Our planning process had become myopic and short term in nature, with our objectives becoming tactical and linear in nature. The three-box framework has challenged us to redesign the planning process, which would allow us to brainstorm Box 2 and Box 3 nonlinear initiatives in addition to undertaking Box 1 operational excellence initiatives. It is important to allocate resources to Box 1, Box 2, and Box 3 projects to maintain a healthy balance among the boxes.”

Yet it is not surprising that so many organizations focus mainly—even exclusively—on Box 1. The Box 1 present is their comfort zone, based on activities and ideas that are proven, well understood, and firmly embedded in the business. Most firms’ organizational structures were built on the successes of the past, refined over time to support the priorities of the present core business, and focused on maximizing cash flow and profit generated by the core. By comparison, the Box 2 work of avoiding the traps of the past is difficult and painful. It may require wrenching management decisions to divest long-standing lines of business or to abandon entrenched practices and attitudes that are unwelcoming or even hostile to ideas that don’t conform to the dominant model of past success. Moreover, the Box 3 methodology for creating the future consists of leaps of faith and experimentation that are fraught with uncertainty and risk. The regime calls for entirely different management strategies and metrics than does the relatively settled and predictable work of executing the present core business at the highest level.

Tragedy of Innovators

Hi Friends!
Yes. It is hard to believe. But true. It is a myth that people love new ideas. People do not accept new ideas when they see one. But that is not enough reason not to have ideas.
Read this excerpt from the book ” Myths of Innovations” by author Scott Berkun.
Imagine it’s 1874, and you’ve just invented the telephone. After hi-fiving your friend Watson, you head down to Western Union— the greatest communication company in the world—and show your work. Despite your excellent pitch (a century before Power-Point), they turn you down on the spot, call the telephone a useless toy, and show you to the door. Would you have given up? What if the next five companies turned you down? The next 25? How long would it take to lose faith in your ideas?
Fortunately, Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone’s inventor, didn’t listen to the folks at Western Union. He started his own business and changed the world, paving the way for the mobile phone in your pocket. Similar stories surround innovators like Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose page rank ideas were turned down by AltaVista and Yahoo!, the dominant search companies of the day. George Lucas was told all kinds of no by every major Hollywood studio but one, for the original Star Wars screenplay. And, don’t forget that Einstein’s E=mc², Galileo’s sun-centered solar system, and Darwin’s theory of evolution were laughed at for years by experts around the world.
Bell is often credited as the inventor, but Elisha Grey merely failed to file his patent a few hours sooner. Second, Western Union did reject Bell’s proposal, but it’s unclear how strong their rejection was. (If they saw its potential, would it have been wise to tell Bell on the spot?) See http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bltelephone.htm.
Every great idea in history has the fat red stamp of rejection on its face. It’s hard to see today because once ideas gain acceptance, we gloss over the hard paths they took to get there. If you scratch any innovation’s surface, you’ll find the scars: they’ve been roughed up and thrashed around—by both the masses and leading minds— before they made it into your life. Paul C. Lauterbur, winner of the Nobel Prize for coinventing MRI, explained, “you can write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature.” Big ideas in all fields endure dismissals, mockeries, and persecutions (for them and their creators) on their way to changing the world. Many novels in classics libraries, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye were banned upon publication; great minds like Socrates and Plato even rejected the idea of books at all.
The love of new ideas is a myth: we prefer ideas only after others have tested them. We confuse truly new ideas with good ideas that have already been proven, which just happen to be new to us. Even innovators themselves read movie reviews, consult Zagat restaurant ratings, and shop at IKEA, distributing the burden of dealing with new ideas. How did you choose your apartment, your beliefs, or even this book? We reuse ideas and opinions all the time, rarely committing to the truly new. But we should be proud; it’s smart. Why not recycle good ideas and information? Why not take advantage of the conclusions other people have made to efficiently separate what’s good and safe from what’s bad and dangerous? Innovation is expensive: no one wants to pay the price for ideas that turn out to be not quite ready for prime time.
There is an evolutionary advantage in this fear of new things. Any ancestors who compulsively jumped over every newly discovered cliff or ate only scary looking plants died off quickly. We happily let brave souls like Magellan, Galileo, and Neil Armstrong take intellectual and physical risks on our behalf, watching from a safe distance, following behind (or staying away) once we know the results. Innovators are the test pilots of life, taking big chances so we don’t have to. Even early adopters, people who thrive on using the latest things, are at best adventurous consumers, not creators. They rarely take the same risks on unproven ideas as the innovators themselves.
The secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to improve the world is rarely matched by support from the people they hope to help.
 How true this analysis is! Genuine innovative ideas do face tremendous resistance and non-belief. People just do not want to accept innovations, unless they are tested and proven. This brings up the critical question we raised in the last post.

Education in India

A brief summary of India's education status, after 60 years of independence:

• Literacy: 65.38% (Male 75.85%, Female 54.16%) – average world literacy 80%
• Children reaching grade V: 59.8 %(2000/01)
• Gross Enrolment Ratio girls (Class 6-8): 56%
• Human Development Index ranking: 126/177 (2006)
• Only 31% of children complete education upto 10th standard and 42% complete upto 8th standard
• One out of three (67 lacs out of 1.92 crore) children in class 5 is unable to read and write
• Only about 10% primary schools have majority of children learning as per expectations
• More than 75% schools have unplanned multigrade teaching
• Public examinations of all kind focus on rote learning - with practically no focus on application, analysis, critical thinking and creativity
• 20 percentage point adverse ratios of literacy and drop outs for girls & socio-economically disadvantaged children

Founders day celebrations

Building Tower game

Agastya International Foundation Hubli has Celebrated a Founders day on December 2nd. All the staff members of Sandbox were present in this event. First Mr. Nitin Desai (Regional Head) told  briefly about the Founders day and we took oath for the betterment of Agastya. then we all Played a  number of games at the same time some of our team members prepared the lunch and we all had together. After that we conducted a quiz competition for all the staff members, at evening we went to one of the orphanage and we spent an hour their.

Balancing squares

my Intorduction

Hi dear ones myself Shrishail from Belgaum. I completed my graduation from Karnataka University Dharwad and currently per suing my Masters in Business Administration form SMU. addition to that i am working in one of will known creative foundation called Agastya International foundation since 24 months. I love to develop the network with the people by calling enough better thoughts with better feelings.

My passion is to develop the equal minded people to generate the new ideas so that a change can come across with the name of  better feelings among the society. Further i wanted to take few more steps

to make my career better.