DRINK: THE NEWSLETTER

Volume 1 / Issue 1

WHY THE ELEPHANT

Elephants are caring, connecting, sagacious, mindful, compassionate, celebratory, communicative, and yes, they never forget. These are all good qualities a leader who serves and advances others to achieve significance.

WHY THE WATERHOLE

“In the African savannah there’s no single place more visited by a variety of wildlife than a waterhole.” – BBC, Waterhole, Africa’s Animal Oasis.

WHY DRINK

My intention is that you will view this newsletter as a waterhole where you can come and join a diverse group drink the knowledge shared, contribute new thinking, and create a better future. Like the elephants, we will be prudent about the content we drink to ensure we learn, serve, and advance.

“To paraphrase Peter Drucker, effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. They think preventively.”

Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, P.163.

Innovation Rarely Happens from the Inside

Why? Most of the time we are too busy to take the time to stop, step way, and create a clearing to think different; think outside of our situation and routine. We create solutions for problems; not solutions for opportunities. We need to shift from insight to foresight. We need to start a dialogue that replaces chaos with clarity. We need to embrace leadership that inspires commitment, ignites creativity, and makes opportunity a reality. Agreed, easier said than done.

This newsletter will explore how to make these advances in leadership, commitment, opportunity-solving, and innovation. We will showcase those who are succeeding. We will share what we are learning. We will engage you.

In the spotlight

Don Bora, Founder Eight Bit Studios
Advocating passionately for women and people of color in technology

Who is responsible for Innovation?

Leaders’ opinions differ on how innovation should happen in their company, who should pay for it, and when they can expect results. Sometimes it can feel as if we’ve all been trained to keep the train moving, increase margins and decrease “inefficiencies” all while turning a blind eye to innovation. After all, innovation is change, and change must be managed!

To paraphrase Pixar’s Ratatouille, not everyone can innovate, but innovation can come from anywhere.

Staying current and relevant in the technical landscape is dating and the pace of change is increasing month over month. For an example, look no further than ChatGPT. a mere month after its debut and it’s anecdotally becoming part of the process across domains in many small businesses.

There are small yet impactful steps you can take to ensure you’re keeping pace with your competitors and maybe even staying a little ahead.

Here are some of the things we at Eight Bit Studios have carefully woven into our DNA over the years.

• Hiring processes can screen for entrepreneurial and independent thinking. These attributes can be highlighted and prioritized for certain roles or teams. Cross-team collaboration to standardize hiring questions can ensure this practice is happing through the organization.
• Culture can be nurtured from the bottom of the org up, ensuring that the company culture reflects and favors the team. Having spent half of my career working for large companies and half of my career at my own company, Eight Bit Studios, I can tell you that nothing beats culture that your colleagues create. Nothing is as authentic. Top-down culture is dictated and hard to adopt and can stifle innovation.
• Strategic and Vision alignment can happen if you are living your values every day. When the whole team is rowing in the same direction, even on company values, innovation can grow organically from every corner of the company. We craft our team shout-outs around our corporate values so that they become second nature and we measure our own behavior by these values.

These are not overnight solutions and they can take some time to implement but the rewards can be immeasurable. I never expected that someone would make a crypto currency out of my likeness but without our naturally curious culture, one of our crypto-curious engineers might never have tried.