Innovation & Opportunity

Ben Arment and Steven Furtick inspire me. Today they each shared their thoughts on innovation and opportunity. You have got to read these posts!

Ben says,

“If you do something innovative and then do it again and again for years on end, it's no longer innovative. So my job is to sabotage sacred cows that threaten the future. I don't want us to wake up someday with an organization that is taken for granted. The hardest plan to change is the one that worked in the past. So to be innovative is to stick my neck out and put myself at risk for unproven ideas.

It's to experiment at the highest levels of excellence and learn quickly from mistakes. No one recognizes innovation while it's innovating, so it's about living in obscurity before ideas take off. My job is to fight for ideas that I'm not even sure will work, but pound on conference room tables and create sound financial models as if I do. It's to help create a culture of progress, which comes with never being satisfied.

It's to identify the talents of others and put them in the right seats. It's to see the future before anyone else and pinpoint the trajectory of trends in culture. In the end, the greatest innovations are those that seem obvious. Why didn't anyone think of that before?”

Steven says,

"Every opportunity has an expiration date.  Exceptional people, churches, and businesses possess the agility to move at the speed of God.  This usually means merging into oncoming traffic at breakneck speed.

A lot of people I know are more fearful of making a wrong move than making no move at all.  Not me.  I’ve been alive long enough to know that if I just sit at the intersection after God has given a green light, He’ll only honk a few times before He passes me by in the other lane.  Doesn’t mean He’ll stop loving me or stop using me.  It just means that that opportunity is gone.  Forever.

If you are currently considering an great, godly, risky opportunity, consider this:
The cost of missing out can be greater than the cost of messing up.


The opportunity of a lifetime must be seized in the lifetime of the opportunity."