Innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. If you forget people’s concerns and feelings when you present an innovation, or neglect to understand their perspectives in your design, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
Interpretation
Innovative ideas are often dismissed not for their value but for the emotions they evoke in others.
Scott Berkun emphasizes that when presenting innovative ideas, it's crucial to consider the emotional responses of others. Innovations can be technically sound yet still face rejection if they fail to resonate with people or acknowledge their feelings and perspectives, which can lead to failure in implementation. Understanding and addressing emotional aspects is as important as the practical merits of an idea.
In practice
In a business meeting discussing a new product, this quote can be used to stress the importance of customer feedback.
There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn’t one.
The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.
What makes the United States great, the reason people wanted to live in the United States, move here still, is because of our ability to innovate.
My definition of 'innovative' is providing value to the customer.
Creativity is every company's first driver. It's where everything starts, where energy and forward motion originate. Without that first charge of creativity, nothing else can take place.
Companies over-emphasize idea generation and under-emphasize idea execution when it comes to innovation.
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
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