Reflections on Corporate Innovation Panel at Concordia University

I recently was on a panel for the Black Students Career Development Conference at Concordia University. The panel was around, or the topic of the panel was about corporate innovation and entrepreneurship. A couple interesting tips or perspectives and mindsets that I shared with the attendees that were all students was around how to do corporate innovation. First of all, you don't just want to do something new or different for the sake of doing something new or different. You need to understand or at least present and share how this new way of working, this new solution, this new thing is going to solve a problem for the user or for the end user.

Now, how do you do that? And this leads me to one of the mindsets or one of the tools that I always think about or often think about. And that is, is what I'm doing increasing pleasure or decreasing pain? Because that's how people make decisions. And that's what people want. They want something that will increase their pleasure and or decrease their pain. So how is this new way of thinking this new solution this new product tool whatever increasing pleasure decreasing pain?

The second nugget or interesting piece of information that I shared, well actually I forgot to share this but I said this after when some people came up to me but I forgot to share this in the session and I wish I did is people make decisions based on emotions first and rationalize it after. And yes, you can have all the data points that suggest that you should be doing X, Y, Z, or go in a certain direction. And all of those data points serve to create a compelling argument. But you still need to feel good about that argument. You still need to feel good about those data points.

So that's what I mean by the rationalization. Because here's an example. We all know that eating McDonald's or certain junk foods or certain behaviors aren't healthy or good for our body, but we still do it anyways because they make us feel good in the moment. If we made decisions logically first, if that was the prime objective of our brains as humans, we wouldn't do things that would be unhealthy or dangerous. We would do things that we all know to be healthy and dangerous. We would all be working out every day, going to the gym, stretching, doing all the things that we're told to do, eating all the five food groups every day. But no, we enjoy cheat days. We enjoy, some people enjoy smoking. Some people enjoy a whole bunch of different things because it makes them feel good. And then they rationalize it later. So that's point number two.

And then the final interesting piece that I shared was don't seek to be promoted. Don't make you the prime objective. Make your manager, your manager's manager, whoever else is on top, make them your prime objective. Help them get promoted. And that doesn't mean you got to do anything different. It just means that you're flipping the way you view each request that comes your way or it flips the way that you view the relationship with your superiors because if you help them get promoted, if you ask them hey what are your objectives and what are you trying to do what are you trying to accomplish obviously those objectives and accomplishments are going to be linked to their ability to get promoted.

So if you support them on their tasks and projects and they get promoted, they will remember you. They will want to help you. And ultimately, you're going to get promoted. But if you're always thinking about how do you get promoted, who do you have to attach yourself to, what projects or things do you have to do, what tasks do you have to get done, it's all about you you you and you're not really taking into consider you're not really thinking about who is that benefiting. But if you start with who is that benefiting, well that will probably benefit your manager. If you work on xyz thing, then that will help them want to promote you. So again, it's just a mindset shift. It's just a perspective shift. It doesn't mean that certain that you need to change everything when it comes to how you operate in the way that you work. It just means that the perspective that you have as you enter into that working relationship with your manager, you're now thinking about them and you will ultimately benefit because you are helping them reach their objectives and ultimately that trickles down to you reaching your objectives.