Making a 22 hour drive from Southern Alberta to Arizona gives me plenty of time to think, and listen to audio books. Fortunately, this time I’m not alone on the trip so my wife has shared the driving, which gives me time to work and write.
While I was in Canada we were spending time with family and I had a chance to visit with a nephew who had asked me to suggest some good books for him to read. We were talking about the different books and he shared a few with me that he had enjoyed that I hadn’t read yet. One of them was Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg. So this is one of the books I have been listening to on my trip home.
There are many intriguing thoughts and stories in this book, but something that really caught my attention was in his chapter on Innovation when he talked about Innovation Brokers or Idea Brokers. The reason this was so interesting to me is because I have been spending a lot of time recently preparing for an upcoming Mastermind Group, and the ideas he shared help to explain how and why a mastermind group works so well.
In his book, Duhigg refers to the work of Ronald Burt in a 2004 study he conducted. Burt conducted a study with a large number of managers in a company and found that ideas that were classified as creative came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. Burt explained that people connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving. “This is not creativity born of genius, it’s creativity as an import, export business.”
As I listened to this and the rest of the book I decided to do a little more research on Burt’s ideas. On this topic, when people seek out insights from people in different fields, different organizations or of different mindsets, Burt refers to it as “brokerage.” He explains how this can lead to better ideas, improving processes and more. He says, “if you’re charged with innovation, you need to branch out and build brokerage.” “It’s essential. The new ideas we come up with come from the places where we vary. A person who only knows about the variations in what they do will get better at what they’re doing, but will always come to the same place.”
This is exactly where the power of a mastermind group comes from. I recently wrote a post High Performance Mastermind Group, and explained a challenge I had dealt with for some time which I had not found a solution to. But when I had an opportunity to sit with a group of entrepreneurs who were all in very different industries than me, we quickly found a solution to my problem as a group because the others in the group looked at my situation differently and had been through their own challenges in their industries.
Joining a mastermind group allows you to look at each other’s problems and challenges from different perspectives, industries and life experiences. But it also gives you an opportunity to discover things that are holding you back that you were not even aware of. It allows you to be more innovative in your business, your life and your thinking in general.
Join our Elite Performance Mastermind and prepare yourself to take your life and your business to the next level! You will be with an elite group of individuals, from different industries, backgrounds and different areas of the country that will be able to share their brilliance and knowledge with the group while you do the same for them. I’ll also be sharing some powerful tools you can use to give yourself the power to create the future you’ve been dreaming about.
If you don’t own or run your own business, don’t count yourself out. Whatever it is you do, you will do it better after joining this mastermind. You’ll think different. You’ll network. You’ll have the tools to be successful.
Be your best entrepreneur. Be the best manager. Be the best employee. Be the best YOU.
