Here is an excerpt from an article written by Umair Haque for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.
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…what problems would you try to solve?
Let me answer that by telling you a story.
Every writer will tell you: first, find a good café. And while I was hunched over my laptop in one my favorite tiny cafes in London — the estimable Kaffeine, purveyors of some of the best coffee I’ve had the privilege to have — something tiny, yet remarkable, happened.
After a few days, James, the barista, noticed that I’d come in, order a flat white, write like a man possessed for an hour or so — but never finish my coffee. He asked me why, and I replied that I espresso leaves me too wired to write, but paradoxically, I always need a little. Without missing a beat, James simply proceeded to create an entirely new drink for me, on the spot: a mini flat-white, which he half-jokingly named after me.
Now, this might sound entirely trivial. Until you ask yourself: how often, despite billions spent on “service,” “creativity,” “innovation,” “changing the game,” “motivation,” “leadership,” and assorted other magical buzzword-incantations, has something like the preceding happened to you, anywhere — ever? My bet is: outside of a truly excellent bar, almost nowhere, probably never.Imagine, for a moment, that you (yes, you) were the next Steve Jobs: what would your (real) challenges be? I’d bet they wouldn’t be scale (just call FoxConn), efficiency (call FoxConn’s consultants), short-term profitability (call FoxConn’s consultants’ bankers), or even “growth” (call FoxConn’s consultants’ bankers’ lobbyists). Those are the problems of yesterday — and today, here’s the thing: we largely know how to solve them.
Whether you’re an assiduous manager, a chin-stroking economist, a superstar footballer, or a rumpled artist, here’s the unshakeable fact: you don’t get to tomorrow by solving yesterday’s problems.
To solve today’s set of burning problems, you just might have to build new institutions, capable of handling stuff a little something like this…
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Umair Haque is Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He is ranked one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50. Follow him on Twitter @umairh.
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