Daily Inspiration: “Your best ideas should be exactly like nothing else!”

“Your best ideas should be exactly like nothing else!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

A shoutout to the Autograph Collection of boutique hotels – “Exactly like nothing else” is the key slogan to their global branding campaign. The phrase certainly caught my attention last week while staying at one of their hotels in Denver.

It’s brilliant! And it’s really easy to see how the idea can easily stretch to the concept of innovation.

I’m a big believer that the more unique your idea is within a crowded field of ideas, the better your chance for potential success. The more original your plans for your personal growth are, the more likely you are to succeed. The more offbeat your thinking, the better positioned you are for our faster future!

When you are like everyone else, you are following on the path of failure that comes with bandwagon innovation.

Jumping on a trend because everyone else has never works because, as I wrote in a blog post:

“Bandwagon innovation? It’s lazy: true innovation takes hard work. It involves massive cultural, organizational, structural change. It involves an organization and leadership team that is willing to try all kinds of radical and new ideas to deal with rapid change. An innovative organization can’t innovate simply by jumping on a trend. Trying to do so is just trying to find an easy solution to deep, complex problems.

Read the post: “Why Bandwagon Innovation and Pursuing What’s Hot is Doomed to Fail”

A culture that involves a lack of unique ideas encourages a culture of mediocrity. It reduces innovation to an “idea of the week,” and does nothing to encourage people to really look at their world in a different way.

Innovative organizations – and innovative people – seek uniqueness. They thrive on being different. Their ideas are different too.

Their ideas? Like nothing else!