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Key Takeaways Real innovation comes from the people closest to the work — not from executives or consultants designing strategies from afar.
When people who deeply understand their work are given the right tools (like AI or automation), they can solve problems efficiently, improve quality and even enhance business outcomes.
A leader’s job isn’t to design innovative solutions from the top, but to make sure nothing stands in the way of the people who will. That means creating an environment where people feel safe to experiment.
Every company has an innovation strategy. Most are wrong; not because the ideas are terrible, but because they often begin in the wrong places. They often start in a boardroom with a pricey consultant’s presentation, rather than with the person in your prospective customer’s organization who is quietly struggling with a broken process that no one cared enough about to understand or repair.
I learned this by speaking with a woman I met at a user conference several years ago. This is in many ways her story — what she told me about her job fundamentally informs my perspective on technology, leadership and where real change often comes from.
The part most never think about
In a large enterprise, close to half of all deals are frequently closed in the very last week of the quarter, many in the final hour(s). Predictably, the sales organization gets the spotlight for landing those deals.
However, behind every signed contract is someone who has to pull information from numerous systems, cross-check with legal, verify with finance and chase compliance threads across dozens of systems. It is complex, high-risk work that is often performed under strict deadlines that couldn’t care less how many threads you’re juggling.
She was one of those people. She processed possibly hundreds of contracts every quarter, and the last two to three weeks in each quarter was working past midnight and waking up early the next day to begin again. She had young kids whom she rarely saw during those periods. The frustrating thing wasn’t that she was bad at her job — in fact, she was very good at her job. It was the process that would wear people down.
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