Every Innovator Is Winging It

This awesome video is doing the rounds at the moment. For some it’s an ‘aha!’ moment when they finally realise the revolution that is Social Media.

I’ve just started reading iCon, one of the more recent Steve Jobs biographies. So far, it’s a gripping read about two guys, selling home made mother boards from a garage and taking their first order for $100,000. No hefty bank backing. No VC funding. No rich mum or dad. And certainly no prior business experience.

It’s the same feeling I had when I read Roy Jenkins’ definitive biography of Churchill. I always thought he knew what he was doing in WWII, that he was carrying out tactics that he’d learnt in military school and were tried and tested over years and years. But in those pages I discovered an innovator – a man fighting in a war that was always changing, never ‘textbook’ – and that the years of experience helped him make decisions with more confidence and wisdom, but by no means did he know that any strategy they employed was guaranteed to work.

Every great leader and innovator lives on the edge. They do not live within the safe margins of tried and tested, for if they did, they wouldn’t be leaders.

We had a Tweetup earlier this month, and it was rather humbling for a few people to comment on how well I was using social media. My confession to everyone was “I’m winging it here”, to which Michael Greenland uttered some life-changing words: “every innovator is winging it.”

Every innovator is winging it, doing their best to navigate the bleeding edge without getting cut, whilst doing it with the utmost confidence in themselves, their team, and the trends they see.