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Melinda Rolfs’ innovation journey began in 2014 the year her attention was first drawn to charitable giving. While working at Mastercard Advisors, the company’s consulting arm, she observed that “there seemed to be one major natural disaster after another. And in our offices there was one of those big screen TVs with CNN on it, and I was just constantly seeing these images of people who had so little to begin with and had lost absolutely everything.” This caused her to wonder what Mastercard could do to help the organizations providing relief. After reflecting on the problem, she stepped back to get a wider view of what her company could do with the resources at its disposal.
Being an expert navigator is the key to innovation success
Innovators must prepare for their journey like adventurers: studying the conditions and being prepared to respond to dynamic elements along their path.
Photograph by Klaus Vedfelt
Whenever Swiss explorer Sarah Marquis tells people about her newest expedition, she gets the same reaction: “You’re crazy!” If she listened to these people, she’d cease to explore at all.
Marquis is an adventurer who’s spent much of her adult life trekking solo through some of the world’s most forbidding regions, from deserts to jungles to mountain ranges, living off the land and blazing her own trails. In 2014, she was named Adventurer of the Year by the National Geographic Society. Her experiences underline the importance of navigation when venturing into the unknown.
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Originals, he preached the value of new ideas. In his new book,
Think Again, Grant wants readers to forget, let go and move on from ideas and knowledge that isn’t working for them.
“If you can master the art of rethinking, I believe you’ll be better positioned for success at work and happiness in life,” Grant writes. “Thinking again can help you generate new solutions to old problems and revisit old solutions to new problems. It’s a path to… living with fewer regrets.”
Sometimes no matter how well-thought out or carefully laid out plans can be, they can give us tunnel vision, Grant writes. When we become open to new ideas, we begin to see faults in those plans, and can identify and prevent mistakes we were likely to make. (February; Viking; $28)
How Businesses Can Support Women in Times of Crisis
JLL’s Laura Beebe provides tips on how to keep women from downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce due to COVID-19. Feb052021
Image Courtesy of JLL
The COVID-19 crisis has disrupted every aspect of our lives. It created social and economic imbalances and accelerated or reversed trends all around the world. The pandemic has also taken a toll on gender equality in the workforce, as women’s jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable to the health crisis than men’s jobs, according to a study by McKinsey & Co. “Women make up 39 percent of global employment, but account for 54 percent of overall job losses,” the study reported.