So you’ve got good cars. Good airplanes. Good hotel rooms. Good software. Good design. Good food. Good whatever. What else have you got?

It’s not out of the ordinary to meet prospective clients who'll spend an hour or so outlining the totally unique qualities / challenges / opportunities their organizations represent, only to finally ask if my team and I have ever solved their exact problem for another client just like them in their specific industry.

If you subscribe to the measurement maxim—that an organization should focus only on what it can accurately measure—you might think that committing resources to stuff with hard to pin down or fuzzy ROI is incredibly risky. The most innovative (and financially successful) companies you can think of might argue exactly the opposite.

If you're not doing everything you can to put your best self out there 100% of the time, if you're not being the absolute best at whatever it is you do, offering fair value and a consistently positive experience, and if you're not communicating clearly, honestly, authentically and strategically with the people who matter the most to you, you're probably not going to matter much to them. And that means opinionomics is going to get you.

Innovation demands change. Innovation demands examining the known, finding it wanting, and then creating the previously unknown. It demands all kinds of behavior that’s contrary to the basic human instinct to cling to the ‘now’ in case the ‘whatever’s next’ is way, way worse.