The "Innovator"

[waywardclam]

I have gone through several personality tests that diagnosed me as an "innovator". I have always thought I had that talent... everywhere I go, I have always been able to think of improvements to the work I am doing, i.e. how the boss can save a bit of money, a lot of work, produce a better product, a happier customer, etc...

And I really like having that skill.

Is this an ADD thing? Do all of you have it too?

What's annoying is that so many people DON'T like innovators. I hate people who hate change. I understand their need for security... but dammit... when there is a better way staring you in the face...

I have felt like a persecuted Galileo at some jobs before...

[joanrdtobe]

Oh My God....I CANNOT believe you are bring this up...

At my job interview yesterday....(a position as a cardiac dietitian)...I asked the question, "So what changes would you like to see happen in your heart patients in terms of outcomes"? (at this point I was meeting with several of the other dietitians).....GREAT question as far as I'm concerned....

Well two of them look at me and say "oh we don't want any changes...we treat the heart patients just like everybody else"....ARGH...SIGH...I wanted to crawl under my chair with embarrassment....not to mention frustration....What they were saying was they are happy with the status quo and that they really don't give a damn if they make a difference in these patients' lives or not....I mean they don't even PRETEND to care...and the chief clinical dietitian is right there watching all this...

Paul, I agree with you....MOST people hate change....ADD'ERs and NON ADD'ers....looking change in the face, most say no thank-you -- they don't want the responsbility that goes along with it.....and for many change is scarey....and it involves risk....what if it doesn't work out....?? (Heaven forbid right? Heaven forbid someone makes a mistake)

I also appreciate security of the status quo on some level....BUT for crying out loud, too much security is booooring.....................

Paul, keep your innovate nature about you...someday a great job will find you and pay you DEARLY ($$$$$$$$$$$$$) for the innovative ideas of yours.....

[why]

Well Paul, about the only thing about my job that I do like is that I am supposed to be an "innovator". I think many people dislike this quality in me because I'm always finding fault. Well, I am finding fault, but not in the context of making someone feel foolish or small but out of a desire to see improvement. I guess I'm an "improvement junkie". I personally think that this stems from my ADD.

As mentioned elsewhere, I always felt like an underachiever (I am, but now at least I know why!). Up untill recently I felt that this was a character flaw, and I just had improve myself: my willpower, my mental acuity, my interpersonal skills and my physical wellbeing. Strangely, I alwys felt that spiritually I am at a higher plane and that is the one aspect I have never felt needed improving.

To get back to the task at hand: all this selfimprovement (glacially slow.....but moving in the right direction....this site has helped quite a bit) has boiled over into my everyday life. Now I'm trying to improve everything. I often tinker with things. This tinkering is ideal in the I.T. world, but unfortunately the higher you rise through the ranks the less it is required of you. Then you start tinkering / innovating with things like the business process and production workflows - oh sure it's fun, but it carries very heavy responsibility. If I am successful - more often than not someones job becomes easier, until eventually we need one employee less! This is a terrible price for someone to pay for my "tinkering". That's why it's very frustrating when the people who are responsible for growing the business are not doing their jobs well.

I think we ADDers are very well suited for innovation - our abilities for latteral thinking are the principal reason for this. Although, the short attention span can help as well - it forces us into new directions, does not allow us to become staid and stale.

As for others not liking innovators - it's natural for "farmers": change is closely linked with fear; their progress is dependent on being slow and methodical. Whereas, change is about speed or more accurately - acceleration (rate of change of speed).

Perhaps this seeming avalanche of ADD/ADHD diagnoses is due to the dangerous position our species finds themselves in. Perhaps nature/genetics/natural selection is trying to help us with self-preservation by selecting for us - innovators/accelerators. Or perhaps - we are the reason that the humanity finds itself at risk - we changed the world too fast.......

Suffice it to say - I would NOT change this aspect of myself for anything. In fact, I stop medicating as soon as I feel my abilities to innovate fade.

Now if only I can use this power for good, instead of evil.....

[LilSisw/Add]

Well I'm one of those ppl who hate change!!! LOL I grew up being an Air Force brat. In the two to three years we were somewhere...where I would finally start fitting in and having the friends we were up and moving again.

But at the same time, I do understand the need for improvement. So I guess it depends on what kind of change. Personal change I have alot of problems with. Examples..ppl moving, me moving, ppl I care about getting new friends or girlfriends (what will the new ppl think of me..will my friends still have time for me), hate looking for new jobs, etc. But that comes from with that whole self esteem problem I need to work on.

As for improvements in systems or ideas....Im all ready to listen to that.


Tina

[joanrdtobe]

Okay here are some quotes on the subject

Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means things might get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.

We don't change as we grow older; we just become more clearly ourselves.

It's not that some people have willpower and some don't. It's that some people are ready to change and some others are not.

Only I can change my life. Noone can do it for me.

[fasttalkingmom]

Hmmmm......... I never thought about this before. I do love change and I offen do look at how something could be made better or done better.

Last year my daughter's Middle School had the kids do a Multiple Intelligence Test...It was something fun for the kids to learn something about themselves...The found out which of these groups they fell into:

Interpersonal.....

Intrapersonal....

Linguistic.....

Body-Kinesthic....

Spatial.....

Musical....

Logical-mathematical.....

My Daughter says she saw me in as Spatial, which I'm wondering is what you might call an innovator.. To me it sounds like all the wonderful parts of being ADD for so amny of us......

Spatial "The Visualizer"

Likes to draw,build,design and create things. Day dream,looks at pictures/slides,watch movies,play with machines

Is good at

imagining things,sensing changes,mazes/puzzles/reading maps/charts

learns best by

visualizing,dreaming,using the mind's eye, working with colors/pictures....

logical mathematical learner"The Questioner" also sounds like so many of us....


Has anyone herad of this test?.....I'll see what I can find out about it on the web if no one else has...

[Garry]

This was very interesting Paula as I am now just recognising that part of my problem stems from the names that are given to things or us in example.

to be told I was Spatial by someone in the know would not have ment a hill of beans to me but by adding the rest

"The Visualizer"

Likes to draw,build,design and create things. Day dream,looks at pictures/slides,watch movies,play with machines

Is good at

imagining things,sensing changes,mazes/puzzles/reading maps/charts

learns best by

visualizing,dreaming,using the mind's eye, working with colors/pictures....

______________________________________________

logical mathematical learner"The Questioner"

and I also relate to this , I am very interested in what you may find on this subject or test

______________________________________________
Where I worked in a Quality Control Function for 7 years the people of the workforse always talked in words such as this
FMEA, PPAP and an 8D in example to name a few. As you got to know what these things were it was no problem but when managment would keep coming down to the floor and spouting off these fancy words that they had learned at all the conferences that they were allowed to attend and expected us to know what they were talking about, it was very hard to deal with.

One day in my typical ADD fashion I asked my boss where the book was with the meaning of all these Fancy words was kept so that I could read it and understand what he was talking about.

I felt I had asked it in a logical sense as I was very serious in my question but becuase there was no book and I had put my boss on the spot , I really feel that he understood that my question was genuine, but to save face for himself it was put back on me as to the stupidity of the question and of coarse there was no book and if I was being paid the money I was then I should know these things.

I was dumfounded to say the least.

[sleepzalot]

Hey Paul,

Another ADD trait!!

I started a company a few years back called "Innovative Strategic Solutions". It was a marketing company which I thought had value as a place to "put" my innovative ideas and could turn them into something useful rather than just having these innovations do nothing.

I found that although I had plenty of innovations, people don't like change and as such, the effort required to change was greater than my desire and as such, I chose an easier option of just being a corporate employee.

I have always been an innovater. One partial ADD trait is the ability to look at process's in there entirety. Another trait is logical sequencing (a lot of ADD people have high mathematic /IQ capability). I spend half my working life thinking of ways to improve inefficient process's. I spend the other half fighting tall-poppy syndrome as I am always the one reccomending new ways of doing things, and those against change are always trying to knock me down.

Sleepz.

My latest innovative idea.......I designed an I/O throughput validation process to compare thoeretical throughput capacity vs actual throughput capacity for tape susbsystems connected to UNIX computer systems as none was available from IBM.

Pretty exciting stuff hey??

[why]

Sleepz, why would you need such a comparison? After all real world performance is not measured against a theoretical ideal but against other real world data - usualy a competing product. When doing cost/ benefit anaiysis theoretical data is meaningless as all senarios are built on a relational level: product A is 10% faster than product B. So long as the data used to describe the two products is calculated using the same principles (apples to apples) then actual numbers are meaningless.

I suppose your validation scheme would be useful to monitor performance variation over time, that is to see if performance is deteriorating. But I guess your tool is probably more suited for R&D at IBM rather than end users like me. Educate me, I'm curious.

[sleepzalot]

The design of the test was based on watching a number systems purchased over time that were based on Vendor statements that were supposedly real world, but the real world always seemed to turn out different.

What I figured in this case, was to eleiminate all the theoritcal values being assumed; create a controlled environment where I could establish a real-word base benchmark, and then compare the real benchmark with projected load capaicites...therefore knowing that if we want a 50% increase in throughput, exactly what capacity increase would achieve it.

It's one of those situations, where about 5 different factors determine the solution, and each time you increase one factor, someone says "but you have to upgrade this as well".

The result will determine real world purchasing of extra processing power with higher I/O throughput will decrease the amount of elapsed time taken to shift a fixed volume of data from one storage medium to another.

IBM just says to buy more capicity...something I wabted to prove would actually work, rather than buy it and find the problem had just moved to something else, requiring me to buy more and more and more.

Sleepz.

[why]

Sounds good. I'm at the point when I no longer base any of my decisions on published data - companies simply do too much to obscure the truth. I feel the "truth" exists in the pricing structure (tempered of course with the performans data, as lousy at it is), peer reviews and personal experience. For years I had Sun and Cisco shoved down my throat, untill I've seen most of that equipment work in practice, I would have bought into the hype. Now, I find very few applications actually justify purchasing the big iron (well not really that big, but I service the SMB market, so you see where I'm coming from).

For one network, we were convinced to buy a Cisco 6006 switch to serve as the main switch. The network had some 400 nodes of which 50% were 10, 45% - 100 and the rest GigE. This thing even at peak times doesn't register above 5% load!!! Sure the customer has a great piece of gear sitting there that's doing the job and then some. But I'm always left wondering if it was an "optimal" solution, or did we err on the price side of the price/performance sweetspot. Anyways, enough shop talk. Sounds like you were trying to find that "sweetspot" too. Good on ya.

[Andrew]

Perhaps, but with all that "horsepower", they could also add a VPN blade to the server, and hardly notice a performance hit.

[why]

Agreed, but they already had a stand-alone VPN server. I was over ruled on that decision. However, having said all of the above - the client now uses that fact (that the switch doesn't even breathe hard) as a sales tool: "See, only the best of breed for us! No expense spared!" (Actually they were so stingy, that I may have ruined a vendor relationship - by forcing them to file down their margin, probably somewhere into the low single digits)

[waywardclam]

/me is totally lost at this point... but glad you're having fun

[sleepzalot]

Hey Paul,

tech talk is always good fun..lol.

The point where I turned the topic left was that I came up with an innovative way to solve a problem we were having at work.

I probably come up with at least one (possibly) useful innovative idea per week; just depends where I am as to whether I write it down, or if it just gets lost in the general haze of forgetfullness.

Sleepz.