The Innovator's Path: How Individuals, Teams, and Organizations Can Make Innovation Business-as-Usual

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Chapter 5

Connect

The discipline of Connect has two dimensions: one is about relationships and the human connections we make with the people we work with and live with. The other relates to connecting to the larger realities of our businesses: vision, strategy, processes, market trends, and more—and also connecting across industries and across disciplines—as we move down our innovator's path.

Connection in the interpersonal sense is one of the first things we experience as soon as we are born as our parents reach out to us and hold us in their arms. In those earliest moments of infant life, we form a connection to our parents. This connection and the nurturing that goes along with it is the major source of our mental and physical growth. As we begin to grow up, our connections broaden to include other children, friends, relatives, and other people around us. There is little doubt that, from the beginning, we all have basic instincts and skills needed for connecting with others. At the same time, and to varying degrees, as we learn how to connect, we also learn how to treat people the way we would like to be treated.

In our businesses, as in our personal lives, connections and relationships are vitally important. Connections we make internally as well as externally are critical to our success as individuals as well as the success of teams, and of organizations as a whole.

John Swainson, the president of Dell Software, concurs:

Most innovations are not the creations of one person. ...