Tight budgets, close quarters and short timelines all make for maximum use of energy and creativity.  Walk into an empty stadium and the amount of energy and excitement one person or even ten people can create is just lost in the vastness of the space.  But pack those same ten people into a Volts Wagon bus and the energy will be overpowering and contagious.  Give any project a timeline of two years or more and it is guaranteed to produce pedantic results and minimal effort for at least sixteen months.  But, give a big project a seemingly impossible deadline of a week or a month and watch the energy meter hit the red zone.  And of course big budgets mean sloppy, low quality and high dollar ideas with most if not all the money being used up before the good ideas begin to come. 

It seems that humans need to be careful of energy diffusion in many things.  Energy is a curious thing, without it you can’t get anything done but the amount of energy needed for any given task varies.  Just like the energy industry there is lots of effort to create renewable energy, conserve energy, lower the consumption of energy and so it is with human energy.  There are many ways we might be able to accomplish a task but which way uses the least amount of energy or actually creates energy with the performing of it?  Re-designing our work and our projects to minimize energy consumption or better yet to actually create an energy buzz is not something we usually think much about.  However, the companies that take the time to re-design their work with this in mind will at the very least be able to accomplish more than their competition and who knows what might be possible when team size and proximity, project timelines and budgets are managed in ways that minimize energy diffusion and maximize opportunities for renewable energy!

After all it isn’t just the lowest cost that wins customers but sometimes it is the highest energy that brings in the fans.  Sometimes there are people and companies that get my business just because it is a kick to work with them and that extra kick has value.  There is a reason that a Yankees baseball ticket costs three times more than the Arizona Diamond Back tickets.  Innovation can happen many ways but it all takes energy so look for ways to maximize your company energy levels and minimize your losses.

Prioritizing innovation is counter intuitive at times because you might need to start with the little things that eventually make up the big things.  The big things will always matter and need to be dealt with at some point but where to start on a big problem is a matter of strategy and strategy is often the secret sauce that can be the difference between success and failure.   Inner city crime is a big problem but where do you start to proactively affect change rather than just reacting to the biggest and most violent events after they have taken place.  In New York they started to address the problem with graffiti removal from the subway system.  In World War II the allies had to attack the deeply entrenched German army but how and where was what kept many military and world leaders up at night.  It isn’t that starting with the little things means you allocate less resources or that it merits anything less than your total focus and 100 percent effort.  It is that the attention to little things sends a message that attention to big things do not.  Obviously, you cannot focus all your efforts on little things that do not affect the big things, that’s an exercise in futility.  For instance, in business it is those seemingly inconsequential infractions against your values statement or the ignoring of safe work practices when you get behind schedule that scream to your workforce and even to yourself, that your word and your company integrity is only a show.  The strategy to work within a value system and with safe work practices was usually made because it was seen to be the most effective way to be successful over the long haul.  But if you give up on that strategy under pressure it begins to undermine the integrity of the entire work environment.  A little lesson learned in my days as a pilot was that it was easier to fly the airplane within 50 feet of your altitude than within 100 feet.  It would seem that a 100 foot variation in altitude would make it easier but it actually made the corrections bigger and harder to manage.  The same applies to the little details of managing your company's culture, if you let them go they will just require bigger corrections and more energy later.  So, manage the little corrections now and you will find that some of the bigger correction won’t be necessary.

We've all heard it said that the future is unpredictable and unknowable.  Is that really the case? 

Do we all have to just sit and wait blindly for it to happen?  Wayne Gretzky, one of the greatest hockey players of all time once said he didn’t skate to where the puck was, he skated to where the puck was going to be!  Somehow, he was able to predict the future in miniature increments better than many of his opponents and that is how he was more successful at the game of hockey.  Yes the future has infinite possibilities but how many probabilities does it have?  Gretzky knew a lot about how the game of Hockey was played and where the puck was most likely to be at any given time during the game and he used this in-depth hockey knowledge to his advantage.  Think about putting the exact opposite of a Wayne Gretzky on the ice, someone who had zero knowledge about the game of hockey.  Do you think that person would have any chance of predicting where the puck would be?  Without a knowledge of the rules of the game and an awareness of the way the players could affect the game it would be virtually impossible to predict any future outcome.  Now based on this little representation we might pass it off as too simple, after all the future doesn’t follow any rules and there are too many players to know how they might affect the future.  However, if we zoom out to take a look at the bigger picture we do see some very dependable patterns and cycles that haven’t changed for thousands of years and this knowledge about the consistencies and inconsistencies can help us narrow down all the future possibilities into fewer probabilities.  Besides hearing “the future is unknown” we've also heard that “luck favors the prepared” so there's ways to prepare for the future.  If “being prepared” can produce future advantages then spending some effort to learn how to be prepared might be well worth our time!

Learn the rules of the game of finance and people and product innovation first then you can be better prepared to make some rules of your own and skate to where the next opportunity is going to be!

One of the most mysterious changes that has been taking place over thousands of years is in the monetary system.  It is mysterious because it is not a science and is dependent on the fickle whims of human nature and yet most business owners treat it as fixed and relatively stable.  Humans are the ones that give money value or take it away.  Many years ago you could exchange a sea shell for a cow or in modern days a piece of paper with green ink and a picture of a long dead United States president for oil.  But again if the changes take place over long periods of time we don’t stop to think of the change as significant or worthy of our attention.  Unless of course we are witness to the tipping point where the monetary system collapses or money changes form.  After all what is money anyway?  To really define money is a challenge.  Money is more of a concept than anything.  It is a product or an instrument that we use for numerous purposes.  We use it to store our wealth, to build our wealth by investing it, we use it to exchange goods and services.  It can change forms depending on the times and situations and locations of nations.  It can be a paper promise of owner ship as in a stock or bond certificate or actual real tangible value held in the form of jewels or gold.  It can come in whatever form is valued by society at a specific time and situation such as cigarettes in post-World War II Germany or Dutch Tulip bulbs in 1637.  Money can change value without changing form such as when inflation happens (the dilution of value) through excessive bank money printing, for example what happened in the Weimar Republic of Germany after WW I when a wheel barrow of cash couldn’t buy a loaf of bread or in modern times the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Africa which was printing 100 trillion dollar notes that are worthless.  It can also change value when the inherent promise of underlying value comes into question such as when a commodity futures contract or stock certificate change value. 

Money can even be used as an instrument of war such as when Japan attacked the Chinese Yuan’s value before any shots were fired at the beginning of WW II.  The strategy was to cripple the ability of China to pay for equipping an army and fighting a war.  It also seems to have had something to do with the western banking system bankrupting the Soviet Union.  So, the uses of money and the forms it may take are probably infinite!  Waging economic warfare can be a national strategy or it can be business to business on a competitor through more competitive products or people or more efficient use of capital.  Businesses can create their own completely different form of money through the value it creates with products and services. 

As changing as the monetary system is, the question still needs to be asked not only about what forms of money are in vogue today but what will the world be using in the decades to come.  Will it be US dollars, Euros, Chinese Yuan or maybe back to gold or seashells or some other form?  It doesn’t matter whether you do or don’t have an international business, knowing that answer to that  question will affect your wealth and the decisions you make!  So, it pays to do your own learning and think innovatively about finance and the fickle, forms of money, if you don’t you could be holding all your money in the form of cigarettes when the no smoking sign comes on!