Let’s start with a question. When do you decide to act on your convictions? At what point, does your passion take over and you just start; dig in and begin? I’m not exactly sure when this point was with our book project, but at some point we decided, kind of a mutal gut feeling – this is it. We’re convinced we’re on to something here. We want to share these ideas in a bigger way. We’re going to write a book – just do it. Get feedback and revise and do some more!
We started researching and doing our first interviews in March of this year. And the ideas kept developing, growing and changing. Our weekends were almost entirely devoted to the Book. After much creative brain storming, we came up with the title JoinCreativePeople (JCP) which said so much, so simply, about our vision and yet left room for more.
Where to start? I started by doing lots of reading (my forte anyway) and summarizing the contents for Martin who is the convergent thinker of the two of us. We chose to write the JCP book with the English title for a German audience. We’re taking a risk, we know. But we really feel that the time is ripe here in Germany for more mind-set flexibility, participartory organisation and openess towards more change and (careful) risk taking.
Even if the economy is stable and strong, companies need to innovate now, while they are on top! The technological and digital changes are so swift and constant. Our society and customers needs are changing constantly, really fast. Think about it, 10 years ago most of didn’t have cell phone and today we can’t live without them. Future success depends on evolving now. Many leaders know this deep down inside and pay lip service to “changing” but it seems they don’t know how and where to begin.
Slowly our JCP concepts began to emerge and we realized that our combination of developing company culture, the creative potential of teams and interactive working space is not really known. Maybe even unique? In the book, we describe what is needed and how to become a dynamic company that will attract high potentials by using customer centered agile strategies like lean startup, or design thinking.
Design thinking is at once a systematic strategy and management paradigma that make hierarchies flatter, co-creation standard drive other forms of productive interaction forward. But I don’t want to get too technical on this blog and bore possible readers with mini-summaries of the JCP book ideas. We have been fortunate enough to talk with many cool and interesting experts on the subject of start ups, unleashing creativity potential, innovation and improving work spaces. And in my upcoming blogs I’d like to share with you some of these really fascinating insights.
Signing off from Cologne, Germany
Karla