The Art of Leadership and Innovation Conference Review

June 5th, 2012 – The Art of Leadership and Innovation Conference, Toronto. What an amazing line up of speakers, what an amazing day of jam packed ideas. I’m not sure which speaker or thought leader I liked the best, or which one had the most to say, but I know I walked away energized and motivated even more to really look at how to incorporate innovation, and yes, leadership into small business. The reason I focus on innovation is because a real leader needs to be innovative, especially in this day and age. Staying the same doesn’t work. It’s easy to look at the sexy innovators like Google, PayPal, LinkedIn, Apple, Facebook, You Tube, but it is the small businesses that innovate, in their small way, is what’s exciting. Thinking like an innovator is what I really like.

I especially liked Stephen Shapiro’s approach to thinking innovatively. “Think inside the box, not outside the box”, “ask the right questions” “think across industry lines”. Love this idea. I read another book which talks about this as well called “BrainSteering”, again, thinking inside the box. I have to say this is hard to do, we are so conditioned to brainstorming and not brain-steering, but something I have been working on in my small business workshops.

Stephen recited a quote from Albert Einstein which I think really look at innovation differently. What was that quote again? “If I had an hour to save the world I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.” Stephen says ” I find in most organizations people are running around spending sixty minutes finding solutions to problems that don’t matter.” Now isn’t that interesting.

Thinking about defining the problem? Great idea.