Innovating for Impact means creating significant value, effecting change, launching a new product / starting a business, and meaningfully improving outcomes requires – Perseverance, Fast Learning, Highly Competent Leadership, Taking Responsibility / Accountability, Intelligence, and Money.
1. On Launching a new Product / Starting a Business
Everyone should dip a toe in the entrepreneurial water – to know what it’s like to own something. This is important to learn how to take responsibility for projects by seeing your recommendations through all action stages, accumulating scar tissue from mistakes, and picking yourself up off the ground and dusting yourself off. It’s a very insightful, learning, and humbling experience, that is very rewarding (when successful) and a very expensive education (when unsuccessful) !
To put in perspective, coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implications, provides a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn to be better. Without the experience of actually doing it, you never develop the strategic and multi-dimensional thinking and appreciation to make good decisions with the learnings, experiences, insights, look ahead, etc. needed.
In launching a new product or starting a business you get to chart your own course, make your own decisions, make your own mistakes, be responsible for your own success: and learn from those decisions, mistakes, and successes that add another dimension to your skills, thinking, personality, and how you form perceptions.
2. On Perseverance
About half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. Why ? Because it’s hard to “ do the new “ – especially if you pour so much of your life into it. And because there are challenging times and rough moments, most people give up.
While perseverance is just one factor in achieving any worthwhile pursuit, science says showing up every day carries outsize importance. Not particularly talented ? Not particularly smart ? …. as long as you show up, and keep showing up, you’ll likely do well.
For example, if you don’t have a talent for sales, sales skills can be learned. If you don’t have a talent for leading people, most leadership skills can be learned from – reading, feedback, being a good communicator, leading by example, building good teams, setting expectations, showing consideration for others, seeking input, focusing on meaningful priorities, etc.
Interestingly, success does entail having various competencies. And if you aren’t talented in a certain area – relentlessly keep learning, developing the skills and competencies needed to achieve objectives, have a vision, value results, people and knowledge, etc. – and keep showing up.
3. On Taking Responsibility
Since it’s rare anyone ever does anything truly worthwhile on their own, it means a good leader needs to take responsibility for the actions and outcomes of the team. And if it’s your initiative, the best way to lead is to take responsibility.
An example of this is Steve Jobs telling employees a short story when they were promoted to a Vice President at Apple, whereby if the garbage in his office was not being emptied, then demand an explanation from the janitor. If the janitor said “ The garbage wasn’t removed because the lock on the door was changed and I couldn’t get a key ”, he’s allowed to have an excuse. However, “ Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering whereby when the person becomes a VP, they need to stop making excuses for failure and take responsibility for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn’t matter why ”.
This contrasts with the notion that many people feel success or failure can be caused by external forces – especially by other people or unforeseen events. If I succeed, other people helped me, supported me, and were with me. If I fail, other people let me down, didn’t believe in me, didn’t help me, or were against me. While these can be factors, there is the ability to better manage or control things for the desired outcomes, recognize you can control yourself and influence those within your realm – and act as if success or failure is totally within your control whereby if success is achieved – you caused it. If failure occurs – you caused it. With this, realize at some point excuses stop mattering and operate on the bases – never make excuses, never list reasons, and never point fingers – unless you point them at yourself, and resolve that next time you’ll do whatever it takes to make sure things turn out as expected.
4. On Intelligence
Jobs spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of intelligence because it’s hard to surround yourself with smart people if you can’t identify smart people ! So, what does high intelligence look like ?
It has a lot to do with memory, how you think, your talents, how motivated and results oriented you are, how quickly you learn and grasp new concepts, how you look at things, how you assess the situation / person, what you do to move forward, etc. In addition, it’s important to have the ability to see the whole thing / big picture / final result with the ability to see and connect the dots. Further, recognize no matter how much information you retain, memory and a superficial understanding of things aren’t enough to make good decisions about various topics or over time. Jobs felt the smartest people excel at making connections with the ability to collect a variety of information and experiences to solve a problem or challenge conventional views in a unique way.
To be good at making connection requires having different experiences to be innovative in linking various elements together. For example, if you have the same or limited experiences as others, you’ll make the same observations and conclusions. To make innovation more rewarding and improve the probability of achieving the desired results, try new things, learn new things, ask more questions, be a better listener, do things outside your comfort zones. This is important to improve your awareness, knowledge, confidence, etc. – to grow your experiences, increase your value, as well as the ability to think uniquely and contribute in new ways.
5. On Money, Life & Happiness
In business and with many people, wealth is synonymous with success – because it provides more options to invest and pursue opportunity. However, depending on your aspirations and values, money isn’t always a proxy for intelligence or other forms of gratification.
While Jobs said his favorite things in life don’t cost much money, he acknowledged money does provide choices – including the ability to make a living by doing what you enjoy – so you can be living the life you want to live. Further, while money shouldn’t be an end in itself, wealth affords the ability to explore, pursue new interests, do new things, fund new projects, etc. – for a more fulfilling and happy life – now and in the future.
With this, realize the better you understand yourself, the more aware you are and the more intelligent you are – the better you are at making these choices ! And find the balance that suites your values, persona, interests, aspirations, etc.
April 7, 2026 CAIL Innovation Commentary info@cail.com www.cail.com 905-940-9000