Jim Lavoie on Jimi Hendrix

I recently posted about Rite-Solutions and how it harvests ideas from its own employees. Chris Flanagan of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) was kind enough to post a comment on this blog shortly after and point to the video of Jim Lavoie (Rite-Solutions CEO) speaking about these ideas at a BIF conference.

I saw the video and highly recommend it (though the first half is sort of skippable). Go see it here.

I wanted to post the transcript of the video but couldn't find one, so I'll contribute my own little transcript for one Jim Lavoie quote which I particularly liked:

Imagine Jimi Hendrix comes into a room and he's got a new idea for a song. He's standing in front of 6 fat white guys with their arms folded asking him if he looked at all the other music ever published in the world to see if his song is really unique. Or if he's done a cost analysis. Or if he's looked at doing it offshore because 'maybe we don't have to do it here'. And there's always the boss who doesn't even talk to Jimi. He asks the lawyer "Is there any risk?".

I call it 'when the inventor meets the preventers'. And that's what's really stopping innovation: white guys that haven't written a song in a lot of years that stop the innovator with stupid questions.

Every word set in stone... Design (or management for that matter) by committee is a bad bad thing.

Thanks for the comment Chris!