John Sweeney - The Innovative Mindset: 5 Behaviors for Accelerating Breakthroughs

Copyright 2016 by Aerialist Press. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN 9781119161288 (Hardcover)

ISBN 9781119161301 (ePdf)

ISBN 9781119161295 (ePub)

Cover Design: Paul McCarthy

Cover image: Chuwy / GettyImages

John: To Jenni and William and Michael, thanks for showing me what the mindset of discovery looks like each and every day.

Elena: To my amazing parents Rada and Dimitar for helping me discover the world and to my husband Bryan and son Dimitar for inspiring me to be a better person every day.

For more than 15 years I have been speaking about, or conducting training sessions on, innovation for leading corporations across the globe. Clients always tell me during initial calls that they are interested in finding ways to increase innovation in their organizations. If I've heard the question once, I've heard it a thousand times: What can we do to make our company more innovative?

Individuals who see me speak or people I run into in my day-to-day life often ask me another question. Whether I'm sitting next to someone on an airplane, serving on a committee for a nonprofit organization, or talking with other parents from my children's school, students in our school of improvisation, or audience members at our theater, people always ask me a little bit about my life and what I do. After we chat a bit they want to know: What are some things I can do to make myself more innovative?

This book will try to help answer both questions. Like many of you, my life has been mostly a journey. Many of the stops on the journey have been quite unexpected; my successes and failures have been unpredictable at best. I'm a different person than I was 15 years ago. I have learned more than I've taught and I made some plans, most of which changed. I've been working hard to be a good husband, a good father, and a contributing member of my community, to build a business, and to share what I have learned about innovation with the thousands of people I speak to and train each year. This book is a collection of observations, stories, and practical advice about how we can become more innovative at work and at home, the science behind our approach, and conversations with people who are truly living behavioral innovationmixed in with some comedic levity.

I've written this book in concert with a woman who has played a significant role in the success of every aspect of the Brave New Workshop Creative Outreach, Elena Imaretska. She is an international business MBA turned improviser, performer, and new product developer.

Prior to joining the Brave New Workshop, Elena was raised in Bulgaria, studied in Germany, worked in Japan, and received a BA degree at Colorado College in Colorado and an MBA from Arizona's Thunderbird School of Global Management. It's fair to say she's been through the ringer on three continents and recognizes the value new ideas, diversity, and different points of view can bring to a company. Our philosophies about the mindset of discovery as it relates to innovation are extremely similar. This book is from my point of view, but any time I reference we, Elena is right there with me.

Elena and I chose to include interviews with innovative thinkers and doers from diverse fields. You will hear from leaders who spend their days in places ranging from the corporate world to a social enterprise venture to city government to a convent in Minnesota to Martin Luther King's church in Montgomery, Alabama. Their stories are personal and diverse for a reason: Innovation demands that we open our minds to all possibilities as a way to find our own personal path to success and solution. We ask that you hear the messages of these stories and then personalize them in a way that works for you. Their journeys and insights will illustrate the concepts we will introduce you to, and hopefully nudge you a bit closer to believing that you yourself can foster an innovative mindset.

This book's goal is to bring the behavioral side of innovation to the forefront of the conversation. We hope it inspires you to embrace the idea that like an athlete or an artist, you can create a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and lifetime plan to practice and improve your personal innovation behaviors. It will show that everyone is capable of life-changing and perhaps world-changing innovation, and that if we all choose to simply spend more time in a mindset of discovery instead of a mindset of fear, our lives and this world can become richer, more productive, and more innovative.

In wraps it all up together and appeals to your idealism to inspire you to apply the ideas of this book to your daily life.

Thank you to Brian Bellmont, Mollie Wulff, and the team at Bellmont Partners, and to Maygen Keller and everyone at the Brave New Workshop. Without your talents and hard work this book would not have been possible.

When people approach our organizationBrave New Workshop Creative Outreachto work with them on their innovation programs, the first step is always to simply set up a call to get to know them and their situation. For more than 15 years I have started with the same question: Can you tell me a little bit about your current innovation program?