Institutional America has knocked the start out of us. We need to get back to being great at starting things in our country. Calling all entrepreneurs. This means you.  Yes, you.  In talking with some of the most entrepreneurial people on the planet I am surprised by how many don’t think of themselves as entrepreneurs.  When did that happen?  Our economic history is all about starting stuff but we have gotten away from our entrepreneurial heritage. We need a national entrepreneurship movement, one that transforms our current entrepreneurship conversation.

Many visitors to the Entrepreneur StoryBooth, an on-line platform the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) launched with Babson College to capture the voice and experience of entrepreneurs, have shared that despite significant experience in starting stuff they don’t think of themselves as entrepreneurs. The prevailing definition of an entrepreneur just doesn’t seem to apply.  I consistently reply asserting the opposite, their experience is exactly what we need in the mix. These diverse stories are critical to changing our national entrepreneurship conversation and launching a new economic era. It’s a big ‘aha’ for me so many entrepreneurs don’t think of themselves that way.  I have to admit, upon personal reflection, as much as I love to start new projects, ventures, and movements, I too don’t think of myself as an entrepreneur.  Go figure.  Clearly, we have serious work to do if our economic future is about entrepreneurship. Read more

Have you ever heard someone say they want to be a polymath?  Have you ever heard anyone ask, how do I become a polymath?  I haven’t.  The word comes from the Greek polymathes or having learned much. A polymath is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas. When we think of polymaths we tend to think of dead scientists from another era like Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci. Rarely do we apply the moniker in modern times.  We need more polymaths. We need a generation of youth who want to be polymaths when they grow up.

It’s easy to wrap our minds around the idea of a polymath in the context of ancient eras long gone.  The entire body of knowledge on earth was accessible to an elite few.  Those with an exceptional mind, privileged access, and the freedom to focus on interdisciplinary study, could become polymaths.  In 384 - 322 BC Aristotle studied under Plato in ancient Greece.  His writings spanned many subjects including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theatre, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology.  In the late 15^th and early 16^th century Leonardo da Vinci was a prototype of the universal genius or Renaissance man. He was a painter, sculptor, engineer, astronomer, anatomist, biologist, geologist, physicist, architect, philosopher and humanist.  Where have all the polymaths gone? Read more

I love to vote. From the buzz of an engaged citizenry, to the sanctuary of the voting booth, to surfing channels and web sites to stay on top of exit polls and real time returns.  I love everything about Election Day.  Voting is at the heart of what makes our American experiment exciting. Voting is the gateway drug to civic engagement.  I always look forward to Election Day.  It energizes me when our community comes together around the sanctity of the polling place.  I love seeing the faces of the many volunteers at the local senior center where I vote. What other civic process brings together elders, boomers, and millennials as volunteers to ensure that everyone who chooses to can exercise their vote? I am always one of the first ones at the polling place in the morning as if the great privilege of voting is fleeting and it might go away if not used immediately. Voting is one of the most important things we do as citizens. Voting is a celebration of human freedom. Read more

Time spent in the public sector as an accidental bureaucrat has made me a keen observer of how states and countries use tax incentives to attract and retain corporate investment and jobs.  I have watched companies extract mind-boggling incentives from the taxpayer simply by either moving or threatening to move jobs across state and country borders.  While tax incentives may be great for corporations they make little or no sense when viewed through a community lens.  Corporate tax incentive deals are a terrible use of taxpayer dollars.

Communities everywhere have lost leverage to companies who now have all the buying power.  Corporations have disaggregated their business models moving capabilities around the world like chess pieces.  Companies are no longer dependent on a single location and force communities to bid against each other competing on who will offer the biggest tax breaks.  Communities are treated like commodities. The pricing food fight is intense and all at the taxpayer’s expense. There is no net new value created when companies move activities and jobs from one community to another.  Consider Captain Morgan & The Hobbit. Read more

Ever want to throw a shot put into the middle of an intransigent organization or system?  I know I have.  With a shot put weighing in at 16 pounds most of us had better either be very close to the target or consider a better way to catalyze change.

You probably haven’t heard of James Fuchs, who passed away on October 8, but he was a classic innovator. Fuchs was the best shot-putter in the world from 1949-1950.  He won 88 consecutive meets, set four world records, and changed the sport forever.  Fuchs teaches us about the difference between best practices and next practices. Read more

We can learn a lot about innovation by observing the social behavior of honeybees.  Who hasn’t been riveted by devastating stories of colony collapse?  This is serious stuff.  From a honeybee’s perspective watching 35% of your fellow Apis mellifera get wiped out is no joke. From a human perspective, think of it this way, one out of every three mouthfuls of food we eat is dependent on honeybee pollination. Bees are responsible for about $15 billion in U.S. agricultural crop value.  Colony collapse really matters. It’s worth paying attention to bees.

The term colony collapse disorder was first applied to a drastic rise in the number of honeybee disappearances in 2006.  It’s an eerie phenomenon where one day worker bees swarm together in great numbers and the next they are gone, poof they just disappear, leaving behind an empty hive.  It’s not as if they leave to join another colony. They leave to die alone and dispersed which is strange given the social nature of honeybees.  Scientists have been working feverishly to determine the etiology of colony collapse disorder. Read more

If Boston, NYC, and San Francisco are the top three U.S. innovation cities why do their economic, education, health care, and energy systems produce the same poor results as cities around the rest of the country?  I read the recent Top Innovation Cities of the Global Economy report from 2thinknow ranking the top 100 global innovation cities with great interest. Of course I quickly scanned the rankings to see which U.S. cities made the list.  While I was disappointed my hometown of Providence, Rhode Island didn’t make the cut I was pleased to see our neighbor Boston was ranked number one.  Two other U.S. cities joined Boston in the top ten, NYC ranked fifth and San Francisco ranked seventh.

Seems logical to ask if the top ranked innovation cities are delivering more value to their citizens or making more progress on the big social challenges of our time than other cities.  What’s the point of innovation if not to deliver value and solve real world problems?

After barely scratching the surface of examining output measures the obvious question is this, if Boston, NYC, and San Francisco are the top U.S. innovation cities why are their poverty rates so high? Why are their education attainment levels so low?  If these cities are innovation hot-spots and models for the rest of the country shouldn’t they deliver better economic opportunity, and better education, health care, and energy solutions, as well as a better quality of life to their citizens?  I thought innovation was about delivering value and solving real world problems.

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Don’t go to war with current models and systems.  Too many are in love with them and you will lose.  Create the future through connected adjacencies.

Why are innovators so quick to go to the mattresses?  Like a scene right out of The Godfather innovators are wired to assume a war footing.  Innovators start from a premise that intransigent models and systems are the enemy and the only way to win is to gear up for an inevitable fight.  Status quo is the enemy in an innovator’s cold war and must be vanquished.  Innovators prepare for war by steeling themselves, building large armamentariums, and recruiting passionate soldiers to join their fight.  War cries may get people’s attention but taking to the warpath, as a theory for change, doesn’t work.  There are too many people in love with current models and systems. Going to war might feel good but in the end you will lose.

Existing business models and systems have evolved over a long period of time.  It’s true most were built for an industrial era that is long gone.  It’s also true we need to design, prototype, and test new models and systems if we are going to solve the big social challenges of our time including health care, education, energy, and entrepreneurship.  However going to war with the current systems will not work.  Too many people are vested in them. Anything threatening status quo is too scary to contemplate for most. Read more

The opportunity to host BIF’s annual Collaborative Innovation Summit is an incredible blessing.  The inspiration I take away every year overwhelms me.  BIF-6 was no exception it delivered.  While the summit is going on I love to watch the reaction unfold, feel electricity from the cacophonous breaks between sessions, observe connections being made, and collaborations hatched. But during the summit I am so absorbed in the flow of hosting that it isn’t until the solitude of the ensuing hours and days that the full wave of blessing hits me.  If I close my eyes I can still see cognitive surplus sublimating into action potential.  It’s palpable and it’s magic.

Each summit takes its own form.  Trusting the audience is imperative.  By not trying to anticipate or prescribe themes, that only the unique group of participants and random collisions of the moment can define, the canvas unfurls in unpredictable and delicious ways.  It’s up to each of us to discern the patterns most relevant to us.  Pattern discovery is a joyful process and integral to the magic. The cauldron of BIF-6 contained 30 plus remarkable storytelling catalysts to get our reaction started.  300 unusual suspects, innovation junkies each with a well-developed questing disposition, took it from there. BIF-6 was a target-rich environment to mine for personally relevant patterns and meaning. Read more

My inaugural Harvard Business Review column gets personal.

I successfully avoided government throughout the first 20 years of my private sector career. But in 2003, after a career first in industry and then as a road-warrior strategy consultant, I found myself as an accidental bureaucrat in the public sector.

I never saw it coming. After a weak attempt at retirement, my wife wasn’t in the market for a strategy consultant to advise on household operations. What I hoped would be a year at home to sort out options quickly became a not so subtle nudge out the door to find my next gig.

I naively raised my hand to the newly elected Governor of Rhode Island and the Executive Director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC) and asked how I could help. The next thing I knew I was at the RIEDC, first as the agency’s lead for strategy and development, and then as a member of the Governor’s Cabinet and Executive Director of the agency. I had become an accidental bureaucrat.

Continue reading the HBR column here: