Hit the First Work Wall

It's Friday afternoon and I am listening to some musicians playing Jimi Hendrix on the beach. They are setting up for this weekend's annual Polynesian festival. There seems to be something going on right across the street every weekend.

I was lucky with traffic and able to get home before 5pm. I try to leave work around 4pm on Friday's as my reward for a week of work where I get in for 8am. This week was tough in that I am hitting my first wall. I don't know about everyone else, but I always seem to hit a period where I have taken in so much information that my head gets cloudy and my productivity drops. Normally this happens in week 6 or 7 (this is week 7 for me). I have grown to accept that this is the way I work, try not to be ridiculously unproductive, and let my head settle.

Work is going well. Chris (my team mate and fellow Merage grad) and I arranged to meet with the CFO next week to discuss our proposal to improve our innovation process. Our discussion paper is complete and sent to the CFO so he would know what we are talking about. The paper looks pretty good. We could have gone into more details with the specific numbers, but at this point we would be making pretty big assumptions and the numbers are only a small part of what we want to improve.

Improving the innovation process in a multi-national, muli-business line company is an incredible challenge. In business school we talk about how to fuel new ideas, good environments for creativity, how to commercialize ideas, but I don't think any school talks about how these wonderful theories can work in any incredibly complex organization. In a one business unit company, its easy to align priorities. In a multi-business line company you have competeting interests, infrastructure issues, political issues, and financial resources you need to structure properly before you can even think about creating that environment. So I am a bit lost for the moment as I try to understand this environment in 3 months which realistically should take me 5 years. This may have contributed to the head fog...