“Every employee has talent of some kind: He or she is skilled at being able to analyze numbers, bring products to market, or close sales deals. But talent is just the starting point. Genius is talent unleashed. It’s the ability to exploit each employee’s unique values, passions, strengths, curiosity, and intuition so they can add greater value, transforming themselves and their organizations. Every employee possesses a personal genius. It just has to be set free”.
This is the thinking of Stephanie Chick of the www.DeliverThePackage.com. She feels that most corporate executives believe that only the top 10% can truly perform at a high level, which means the rest are wallowing in mediocrity. She goes on to say, “What you achieve is a direct result of what you believe. If every leader and manager could embrace the fact that every employee, regardless of their ethnicity, gender, or educational background, is capable of greatness and possesses personal genius, can you imagine how that might change employee attitudes and actions on the job?”
Chick continues that, “Talent creates, but genius innovates. Talent excels while genius exceeds. There’s so much human potential that lies dormant within organizations—potential that companies aren’t tapping into that could help them achieve greater success. Instead of tackling the talent gap, companies need to focus on unshackling the genius inside their organizations because it will give them far greater gains.”
I believe that large organizations actually sanction mediocrity, which is why entrepreneurship is so hard at large firms. Genius-style thinking typically does not fit with most large company cultures. For some this means that they must leave the safety of the corporation and become an entrepreneur.
So the question becomes what is your genius and how can you exploit it? I think to find that genius within you must first reject the culture. You must quit. Only then will you find your genius. Failure will be part of the process along with disapproval from friends, family, and colleagues—rejecting the status quo will be hard and lonely path.
What is your genius? Maybe it is to stop doing the mundane or it might be the mundane reinvented. It is hard to say what your genius might be, but go ahead and let it be free.
Ready, set, quit.
John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.
P. S. For more on this subject see:
http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/oct2008/ca20081014_150656.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
Or contact Stephanie Chick at Stephanie@DeliverThePackage.com.