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“The thing I’m most worried about, and I mean this with all my heart, is the inability of people who have great ideas to express themselves in a way that other people can understand.” Jack Anderson, Innovation Special...
“There’s a great quote by Suzuki that says, ‘In the mind of a child or a beginner, all things are possible. In the mind of an expert, only a few.’ A corporate culture that wants to be perfect will keep going back to the ...
Jack Anderson, Chevron Innovation Specialist shares his secrets on how to develop innovation ideas. “The thing I’m most worried about, and I mean this with all my heart, is the inability of people who have great ideas to express themselves in a way that other people can understand.” Watch more world business leaders discuss business innovation.
Jack Anderson, Innovation Specialist, Chevron
Jack Anderson is a former innovation specialist at Intel Corp. and current program manager for Global Innovation Services at Chevron Corp., the San Ramon, California-based oil giant is experimenting with ways to make innovation a repeatable result. One of the first steps was building a 2,000-square-foot ‘innovation zone’, where select members of Chevron’s 62,000-strong workforce are literally walked through spaces that are designed to get creative juices flowing.
The thing I’m most worried about, and I mean this with all my heart, is the inability of people who have great ideas to express themselves in a way that other people can understand. We have a poster in our innovation zone at Chevron that’s called the chasm crossing. On the left-hand side, picture these people reaching out across a chasm. They have great ideas, they have inspirational thoughts, but there’s the big gulf or chasm between them and the people that can use those ideas or make a decision on them, or the value that they can add.
You know, think about a technologist when they love their technology so much they’re gonna bore you to tears by explaining how each little widget works, but that’s not the essence of what they’re trying to say – get ’em to tell their story. So we do a lot of things just to kinda get to the point. Two minutes, like if you were thinking about a elevator pitch or that kind of a thing. There are some very interesting things emerging around this exact same thing. Sometimes it’s just training them to think, who are they talking to, or who would care, why? Get ’em to think about the audience of their ideas.
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