Everything Connects

EVERYTHING Connects.

And because it does, “the depth of understanding that we have of ourselves and others will be the asset that we use the most throughout our working lives.”

Everything Connects by Faisal Hoque and Drake Baer is a book about how to create an innovative, sustainable organization. But it is much more. It’s about being intentional about relationships to create the space to do something great.

1. Converged Disciplines. Ideas from one discipline aren’t isolated from another. The disciplines in a sustainably innovative organization form a single entity. An ongoing part of identity building—both in our individual working lives and as part of a team—is to practice inviting a breadth of experiences, a pool of experiences from which we can draw on later in life.

2. Cross-Boundary Collaboration. No one operates in a vacuum. The more we can connect the people within an organization, the more we can increase our overall potential. Relationships are the bandwidth within an organization, which means we need to be deliberate in forming them. You have to quash any sense of a zero-sum game.

3. Sustainably Innovative Structures. If you are not careful of the culture that’s being created, it will merge thoughtlessly rather than by design. Organizational structures can wreck your organization if you rigidly cling to the product that they’re built to deliver rather than the value they attempt to create. “They couldn’t change because all they could think about was how to improve the thing they did, not the value they offered.”

All of this leads to setting up a system that continuously discovers. In other words, Hoque says, “we’re responsible for our long term growth in each short-term situation.” A long-term mindset that we manifest every day. Wedding the long-term to the short-term requires “mindfulness and authenticity, for mindfulness allows us to directly perceive our experiences in the moment, while authenticity acts as a star in the night sky, orienting us toward the future we wish to arrive at.”

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:15 PM
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