Give Your Career an Edge With Innovation

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick. And welcome to CareerCast at the Chicago GSB, to help you advance in your career. Today we're speaking with Sarah Miller Caldicott, who is founder and president of StarWave Associates. She is a great-grandniece of Thomas Edison and his second wife, Mina Miller Edison, and the author of Innovate Like Edison. Sarah has been engaged in creativity and innovation throughout her life, including the consulting she does now as a marketing executive in the Fortune 500 world working with major brands at Quaker Oats and Unilever.

Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Thank you.

Anita Brick: You've written a great book. It's very interesting. And innovation is sort of the way that we are able to advance, certainly in business. As I was reading your book, I thought how those five innovation competencies really could be applied to careers.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Yes, absolutely.

Anita Brick: So if you think about them in aggregate and in a general sense, how does innovation help someone in their career advancement?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Well, innovation I think can be looked at as a way for us to reinvent ourselves as we look at jobs or positions that we might like to hold at some future time. We can begin to project ourselves into that position and think about what we need to do—what kind of competencies, for example, we need to bring into our own world to allow ourselves to be considered for positions that are out into our future.

So innovation is a way of creating new value and bringing new value to our own world and our own thought process.

Anita Brick: That's a great way to look at it. So could we, like, dig in a little deeper with the five competencies?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Sure.

Anita Brick: So the first one is solution-centered mindset.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Yes.

Anita Brick: Basically how to have single-minded determination and focus on finding solutions. How does this apply?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Well, this is a major area for anyone who's seeking to create a new position for themselves in their current company, or who may be in career transition. Looking at solutions newly was something that Edison excelled at doing, and there were a couple of ways he did this. One was he was very aware of what his own passions were.

And I think sometimes in our career lives, we can get burned out from time to time and we forget what our passions are. So to the extent that we can begin to align our passions with our career activities, we start to draw upon new energies and new vitality that can make us more dynamic in the workplace. So that's one place to begin, is to look at your passions and align your goals to those.

Another thing that I think is very important is the notion of staying positive. A lot of times if we see someone else getting promoted ahead of us, for example, or some industries that are starting to contract, including our own, sometimes we begin to have a negative mindset about the possibilities for the future. And Edison was extraordinary in his ability to stay positive.

In fact, in the book, we call it charismatic optimism because it was so infectious. It spread to his teams and his employees and colleagues. So part of his secret here was to simply realize that life has flow; it has its highs and its lows. And even in the low times, we can find solutions and new pathways that don't seem obvious. So staying positive is a critical part of our search for new career opportunities.

I think one other thing I would like to add is the notion of experimentation. Sometimes we get very risk-averse and don't think about new career paths outside of an industry that we may be very familiar with. For example, we've seen so much upheaval in financial services lately related to the subprime mortgage challenges, and that's going to have ripple effects for quite some time.

So anyone who is in financial services now, you know, may be concerned about their future or their job. So looking outside of our own career path that we've historically followed is another way to open up new pathways. Thinking of new industries—even thinking of going out on your own, for example—might be new options that you can start to consider.

So Edison liked to look at outliers and not just the things that seemed obvious and most immediate.

Anita Brick: How do you stay focused when there are positive things that are happening, but maybe not in your target field or the one where you're really passionate?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: I think one thing that can be done is to start noting down the things that are of concern to you. Things that may be on your mind. And Edison did this as part of his second competency, actually, the kaleidoscopic-thinking competency, where he was looking at options and looking at ideas and trying to find patterns within them. If we can maintain a notebook, which is something that Edison did quite consistently, perhaps we can start to see patterns in the concerns or the ideas that we have.

Sometimes we don't think that our insights are particularly valuable, but Edison felt that whenever he had a thought that continued to recur to him, he would write it down and not let it slip away. So this is a way that we can start to focus on some of the thoughts and ideas that float through our minds that we don't often capture. So maintaining a notebook is one way of doing that.

Anita Brick: How do you then use that notebook to see patterns? I mean, what are some things that you can do rather than have the whole notebook look like just a jumble of random ideas?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Well, that's a great question. One thing that Edison did was he dated all of his entries, and he went back at the end of a given week and always looked to see what he had noted down in his notebooks over the course of the last several days. So this was one way that he was able to see patterns.

I know, even in my writing of the book, I wrote down ideas that I came back to. Even three months later, they were thoughts that just had flashed through my mind, and I really wasn't able to see a connection until, you know, 90 days beyond the time I actually wrote it down. So if you have a practice of reviewing your thoughts, then it helps to go back and follow the date trail, if you will.

And sometimes you can even … your notebooks. I had a separate notebook for my book. So if you're looking for a job, create a separate notebook for your job search. And that way you can kind of, if you will, classify or categorize some of the ideas so that as you look back, not everything seems so random. Things will be a little bit more thematic.

Anita Brick: Thank you. And you sort of made the bridge for us into kaleidoscopic thinking or—I love the expression—blowing the lid off the box.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Right.

Anita Brick: How do you get away from traditional thinking and/or kind of the conventional career paths that, say, MBAs might want to go into? I would call them MBA rivers: typically consulting, investment banking, management. How do you step away from that traditional thinking to really zero in on what might be right for you, and maybe even use that unconventional thinking in your approach to the job search or the career transition?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Well, there are two thoughts that come to mind. One is, Edison had an approach to looking at ideas and creating ideas that in the book we call Practice Ideaphoria. And these are a collection of techniques that Edison used to, as you were saying, dissolve the box or blow the lid off the box. And there are two thoughts that I have.

One is using analogy. Edison felt that every innovator needed to be able to see and work with analogies. Specifically, what he meant was taking two things that seem unlike and trying to find out how they are alike. For example, he invented the first electric circuit this way by looking at telegraphy, something he understood very well, and comparing the concepts of telegraphy to electricity.

So normally we wouldn't pair those two things together. But what we can do in our work lives is take a career path and just name it. So let's say investment banking, to use one of your thoughts, and pair it with something completely different, like gift cards. How is investment banking like a gift card?

Anita Brick: OK, so tell us, how is investment banking like a gift card?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: So this is the process that you go through, is to streamline and look at what flows into your thoughts. One is that they both have value. One is that they can both be sought and purchased or, if you will, identified at a specific time: a gift card can be bought for a birthday; investments can be made for a specific reason, such as going to college, for example.

So you start through a stream of thinking and it begins to dissolve the box and take you outside of your normal thought pattern of what is investment banking or what are the opportunities there. You can loop through several cycles of this. You could say, how is the internet like diamonds? So those are two things that are very different and begin to put some thought streams together in that respect.

So that would be a way of practicing the Ideaphoria using Edison's kaleidoscopic-thinking techniques. What I often do when I go through this process, and I use this myself, is to then draw out a mind map of the ideas which have resulted from my thinking. And a mind map is a way of looking at patterns. So it's different than a notebook.

It's a way of drawing down the ideas and linking visuals or pictures to them, and seeing where the ideas take you. So this is something I actually do with executives, and inevitably a new idea or series of ideas will result, because again, it's a way of dissolving the box or just completely climbing out of the box.

There are some thoughts on mind mapping in the book. It's a very simple technique, and I love the ability of a mind map to express ideas visually, which is part of what Edison was a real believer in doing.

Anita Brick: So we talked a little bit about how to maintain or even grow energy and come up with ideas and come up with fresh perspectives. But the third innovation competency is full-spectrum engagement.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Yes.

Anita Brick: Or creating comfort with complexity and flow. How is that different than what we've already talked about?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Well, full-spectrum engagement represents Edison's ability to navigate opposite ends of a spectrum. So looking at two things that are opposites, for example—as you said, complexity and simplicity. Those are two things that lie 180 degrees apart from each other. A few other examples of full-spectrum engagement from the book are intensity and relaxation or seriousness and playfulness. Solitude and team.

So sometimes we're very comfortable with one end of the spectrum, but not the other end of the spectrum. So solitude and team would be perhaps an example. Do you spend time in solitude? Do you allow yourself time for reflection, whether it's every day or, say, two or three times a week? Edison was quite dedicated to that concept.

He found that when he spent time alone, his ideas were more robust, and then he would go and share his ideas with his team. So this is just an example of going from one end of that 180 degree spectrum to the other. So in a job search, or when we're looking to get a promotion and advance our career, we need to be able to navigate more waters.

We need to be able to expand our thought process as well as our comfort with new ideas. So full-spectrum engagement gives us some clues on how Edison did that and how we can do that today.

Anita Brick: OK, let's take an example that comes to mind. And often people feel comfortable with one end versus the other. And usually it's the first one. So in the career transition process, a lot of people feel comfortable going on the internet looking for job postings, looking for information, which is a very solitary experience. And at the other end is networking.

And I know there are things like LinkedIn that kind of bridge it a little bit, but the engagement part of it is more person to person. When you are kind of networking.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Absolutely.

Anita Brick: How do you bridge that? If your comfort level is really on searching the internet, maybe sending out resumes, looking for postings and not really doing a whole lot of interaction, how do you make sure you get to the other end if you're afraid to do it, or you're not even sure it will work?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Well, one thought I have there kind of goes back to solitude and team, which is part of full-spectrum engagement, but it also connects us over into mastermind collaboration, which is the fourth competency and the discussion of networking. Becoming a master networker is part of mastermind collaboration. But what we could do initially, if we don't consider ourselves networkers, is to just get two or three of your friends together and sit down over coffee and talk about some of the findings that you came up with from your internet search, and just start talking about them to your friends, people that you trust, people that you respect.

So that would be maybe a simple step, an easy near-end step that you could take to start sharing your thoughts about what might be possible for you. So getting feedback from just a couple of people can be a good first start. Rather than launching yourself into a room of 50 people, which sometimes feels a little bit more daunting.

Anita Brick: Yeah, and I don't think it necessarily builds relationships unless you, again, take it down to ultimately a one-on-one dialogue.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Absolutely. So I think this is one of the ways to get started. Another thing that I have found very helpful, and which Edison did in his time, is to talk with people who aren't necessarily in your industry. So let's say you're in marketing and you are looking for another marketing position. Talk to someone who might be in finance, or talk to someone who is in manufacturing because they're going to have a different view of marketing than you will, and they may open some pathways of thinking that you haven't pursued yet.

So that can be another way of getting yourself outside the box, if you will, in the way that even you're conducting your searches online. You might come up with some new keywords or some new search words to go after.

Anita Brick: Good point. So the mastermind collaboration, which you mentioned just briefly—how do you use that whole concept to develop your own team who maybe you can support and can support you in the next step in your career, whether it's an internal promotion or an external move?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Well, that's a great question. This, I think, is very important because sometimes we surround ourselves with people that we're comfortable dealing with who actually may not always be solution oriented. This is really one of the key differentiators between a mastermind collaboration group and just a plain team, for example. So look for people who are solution oriented in your opinion, and work with those people as a team, say five, six people or however many you may wish to select.

Try to find people who are positive; who have cultivated that charismatic optimism that I was talking about earlier. There's nothing that's going to put a damper on your new ideas faster than someone who's just going to say, “You know what? That's just a ridiculous idea,” before you've even had a chance to explore it.

Anita Brick: Good point.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: You want to be sure to surround yourself in this process with people who are going to support your ideas and help you build them out.

It doesn't mean that ultimately you're going to pursue all of them, but don't shoot something down just on the first try. Allow yourself to build some new concepts, some new thinkings. Find some patterns that might support some of your ideas and allow your colleagues to help you in this process.

Anita Brick: There's a really good analogy with building a business. At the beginning of any new idea or new business, you need people who are supportive, who are going to help you crystallize your vision. And then in stage two, you probably need people who are a little bit critical to help you see where the holes might be.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Sure, so you can strengthen it.

Anita Brick: How do you alter your mastermind collaboration from stage one to stage two?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: One thought I have there is you want to be sure that you have some resources at your disposal that will bring objectivity to the process. It's one thing to be supportive and to add ideas, and it's another thing to say, OK, I see that you've developed your ideas to a certain point and you've gotten your ideas to a critical mass.

This all looks very positive. However, you need to consider the following two or three factors. So that is a person whose opinion, if you will, may be objective. So you're looking for people who are going to be constructive, but who have an objective viewpoint that you will respect. Again, not someone who's just looking to poke holes in every part of what you're doing, but someone who can build upon what you have and yet objectively offer you advice.

Anita Brick: Good point. I guess it goes to our last innovation competency, which is super value creation. How do you then take what you've learned from the mastermind collaboration and move it into a strong positioning and story, in a sense that shows the enormous value that you, as an individual, can bring to the next step in your career.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Well, that's a great question, and it really is a big part of super value creation. That's just competency to be able to tell your story—to be able to, if you will, narrate or relate what you're doing in the form of a story. So you can talk about, for example, how what you're doing links into trends in the marketplace, how it connects to a particular customer audience for business audience that either you're trying to reach or the party that you're speaking to is trying to reach, and as well, how you're going to shape this idea from the perspective of a model.

How does the form and structure of what you're proposing create value? How does it differentiate your idea or your team or your concept in a unique way? So that's where you start to link the value together. But I like to suggest to my clients and my colleagues that they begin it as telling a story. So if that story is motivating to the people who are listening, then they can say, oh, I'd like to hear more on this particular angle of the story.

And it might be, for example, the structure or the business model part, or it could be who is the target audience for this? Who are you really aiming for? And offer clarity around that point. So a lot of times Edison's inventions and innovations were of course discussed in the laboratory and great momentum and dynamism would be created as one team was describing to another team what they were working on.

And through that exchange, almost relating it as a story, they were able to build and add new value and new perspective to their colleagues.

Anita Brick: So one thing that came up—someone who submitted a question—he or she had a question about, how do you understand what is motivating to a potential employer so that you tell the right story?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: My thought is to try on your story in a couple of different situations with a couple of different people, literally like as an experiment before you go to—I'll call it the Big Show, the person that you really want to reach, so that you've tried it a couple of times before you actually do your big road test. Find some other people to tell your story to, and just do the very best you can.

When you get to that ultimate person that you want to reach, there's not always a surefire way of knowing how it's going to go ahead of time. But if you've practiced it and rehearsed it a couple of times and you feel comfortable with your material, I think that's a huge part of it, because you're going to be getting questions that you may not expect.

So if you're comfortable with the logic, if you're comfortable with the flow, that's going to help the person that you really want to present to feel that you are getting your message across. They can have confidence that even if you don't know the answer at the moment that he might ask you, or she might ask you, that you can go find out. So that sense of confidence, I think, is a big part of making that final pitch, quote unquote, to the person that you really want to reach.

Another thing you can do is find some of the colleagues or networks, the connections that this person may have and ask them, what kind of dial does this person prefer? Is this person formal? Is this person informal? How do they like to have their presentations made—verbally with, say, PowerPoint, or some type of visual support? So you can do a little bit of advance homework, if you will, on your audience to try to find out the best ways of reaching him or her.

Anita Brick: Good point. How do you know what to leverage? Say you have a brand and you look at different ways to leverage that brand. Each individual is a brand, but we also have elements of our background, like an MBA from the GSB, that is also part of our brand. What would you suggest to create the most power from leveraging our brand as a whole and the elements of our brand?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: I think today it's more important than ever that people present themselves as multifaceted. Today, because we're all competing in a global economy, multiple skills and multiple competencies are necessary. So when we're selling ourselves as a brand, which is something that Edison did a great deal, he positioned himself to investors. He positioned himself to other scientists whom he wanted to work with.

He had to identify the multiple capabilities that he was able to bring forward. As we look at these things today, education is one aspect of our skill set or competency set. Our past career experience is another example. But then there are also things like presentation skills or relationship building skills or, let's just say, you know, internet capabilities—whether those be programing capabilities, search capabilities, website development capability—so they can take a lot of different forms. Ensuring that you're able to position yourself as a multifaceted individual with specific strength areas I think is critical today.

Anita Brick: Great. This was wonderful. It was a very interesting way of looking at kind of career transition and career development from a different perspective, which I guess is what we all need to do when we look at our career: look at that from multiple perspectives as well.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Absolutely.

Anita Brick: So any final bits of wisdom that you'd like to share with listeners?

Sarah Miller Caldicott: One thing that I've noticed in the last several months that seems to be gaining tremendous momentum is the whole notion of social networking. And of course, we've all heard of Facebook and MySpace and many of the other social networking sites, but as adults, we don't often tend to go to these sites. They're in most instances for individuals, say, 15 to 25 or something of that nature.

Although more adults are going on to these social networking sites, I think it's critical today that people understand what their own social network looks like. So I would encourage you, as part of your innovation process, to actually map out your social network. There's a link in the book that offers a software program that could help you do this, but I actually did it by hand, which I found went a little faster.

So when I did this, I looked to see how many people do I know in the world of finance? How many people do I know in the world of politics? How many people do I know in the world of marketing? And I tried to break them down. Then, based on age, do I know people of a whole variety of age spectrums?

Do I know people in a variety of industries—for example, within finance? So this was a very powerful way for me to begin to get a handle on my own social network. And I saw, for example, that I don't know many people in politics, so it was just an interesting way of breaking down my own network in a new way that became very powerful, to give me new options and new ideas of how to move forward with some of my own goals and objectives.

Anita Brick: Well, we wish you continued success and we thank you for taking the time. What a great gift that you gave a lot of people. It's a great book, and lots of good information: Innovate Like Edison. And if you'd like to check out some of the information that Sarah has on her site, you can go to www.SarahCaldicott.com.

Sarah, again, thank you.

Sarah Miller Caldicott: Thank you, Anita.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at the Chicago GSB. Keep advancing.