In a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive world, the next breakthrough idea wins.

Depending on how you feel about #innovation, #creativity, and #breakthrough thinking, you may find this concept either frightening or exhilarating.

It’s frightening if you think of innovation, creativity, and breakthrough thinking as specialized skills that are only available to “the others.”

It’s exhilarating if you realize that innovation, creativity, and breakthrough thinking are natural human traits that are available to us all.

In other words, if you ...

You’ve heard of FOMO, right? Fear Of Missing Out. It’s why we’re addicted to Facebook and Instagram and all the rest. It’s why we tell our devices to notify us the instant anything happens anywhere in the world. Because heaven forbid we’re not in the know!

Industry leaders have a similar fear, which I call FOD: Fear Of Disruption. They don’t want to be the Blockbuster to someone else’s Netflix. They don’t want to be the ...

I grew up in the shadow of an Amish dairy farm (depending on where the sun was, of course) in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Now, if you’ve spent as much time around the Amish as I have, you know that they’re kind of big on horses. And if you’ve spent as much time around Amish horses as I have, you know that they all have something in common.

They’re all wearing blinders.

Partially as a fashion statement, of course, but mostly so that they ...

We all run into obstacles.

Maybe it’s a business change that we don’t like; a traffic jam when we’re already late; a system or process that feels overly cumbersome. But we all run into obstacles.

And what do we do when that happens? What do we do when we run into that obstacle?

We whine. Grumble. Curse. Complain. Gripe about it to others.

And that’s where most of us stop.

In other words, the entire process for most of us looks like this:

1. Run into obstacle.
2. Complain ...