FIRST PART

THE INNOVATIVE INTELLIGENCE

That which is increased when you practice the Kamasutra of Innovation

THE WAVE

Unlike sex, in innovation it is not good being upside-downed

Why to increase the innovative intelligence? Why so much fuss about one being creative and divergent? Is it a fashion? Is it a campaign to sell books and technology? Is it the same old story with which companies want to give a hard time to their members of staff? Is it really very necessary?

From my point of view, the innovative intelligence is the most important capability in our era and makes a difference of either being cold dead or being in the highest levels of well being.

Look, the history of the human kind is the history of innovation: agriculture was an innovation, and currency, paper, and black powder, the ships, the trains, the printing press, photography and if you look around, you will observe that everything that surrounds you too, innovation is not a new concept, human beings have been devoted to change the reality during the last 150,000 years, then you could ask me: why in these days that people are creative has grown more importance if innovation is not something new? I would tell you that the new thing is not if there is or there isn't innovation, but the frequency and the speed by which it happens.

The speed in which an innovation is launched, one after the other is supercalifragilisticexpialidociously fast, and each change makes new exponential changes that affect our lives and of the ones that inhabit this planet.

Time before the practices of society lasted decades, even centuries to transform, and now the ones that we are in our 40's have seen more changes than five entire generations in the Middle Ages. For the sample of a bottom (and I offer myself as a bottom): I had made my message across letters, fax, telephone, beeper, e-mail, cellular phone, Messenger, Myspace, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and it is very likely that in the next years I'll communicate brain to brain.

When I was in junior high school, the boss —my dad— who is a very technological person, used to have the cramp, that's the way we used to call an old Datsun car which took us to the beach, taking at least 8 hours to get there, while normal cars took only 3 hours —only if it didn't get broken on the way, because the cramp was the oldest car among all the dads that I knew, in contrast the boss bought a PC in 1990, something that in the public junior high that I studied was considered almost as a devilish artifact. My friends went home and got astonished with the things that the black screen with green font of the MS-DOS operative system could do, and the teachers banned us to deliver homework made in the dot matrix printer. We saw the 3 ½ floppy disc the one that can pack even less information than any of the apps you have in your mobile, as something as great as any of the spaceships in Star Wars. Now you can just wonder how it was for my grandmother who worked with the Morse code in Telégrafos de México the telegraph office, when I invited her to sail in Internet for the first time.

What I want to tell you is that I have been able to live the recent 38 years where the world has gone thorough many more changes than in the last 149,722 of the human kind history. Have we seen changes, haven't we?

•Digital communication, an overflow of communication at our reach.

•The greatest discoveries on neuroscience in all history, with the arrival of brain scans.

•Impressive breakthroughs in medicine.

•Increment in the life expectancy in many countries.

•At the same time, illnesses created by the same innovation.

•Biological weapons.

•Foods development, that as well as innovation, go faster than evolution, our bodies are not yet prepare to assimilate.

Thus, in my country, Mexico, talking about length, I mean height, there are kids much taller that there were in previous generations, but unproudly, talking about width, we have also grown, we won the first place in children obesity and second place with adults in the world 2013 championship.

Good or bad? It depends on the view of each one. I frequently meet people who say: The old good times were better, even though the Egyptians, the Greek, the Romans and the persons of all times have always said the same: I wish I could've lived in another day. What do you think? In what times would you have liked to live? In the ancient times? Would you have liked to be an emperor, a pharaoh, or a warrior? Maybe the Middle Ages? Would you have liked to be a king, a count, or a witch burnt at the stake? In the Renaissance? The Pest? The Industrial Revolution? The World Wars? What role would you have liked? An entrepreneur? A feudal lord? A slave or a worker who worked eighteen hours for nothing? A queen, a scientific or a woman without the right to vote and hold an opinion?

With its advances and horrors, there are many times that fascinate me, including ours, most of all I think that daydream about living in another time turns us nostalgic and bitter, I prefer to ask myself what can we do with what we have?, until at least someone invents the time machine.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that everything innovative is good, the all and the nothings are for fanatics. Each one has its own light and shadow, its advances and its retreats and proper characteristics. The questions I ask myself is:

What are our options face to the circumstances

we need to go through?

In the year 1500, change was as strong and fast as a wave in a wading pool, and today the speed of change is as a tsunami, or at least, like one of those big waves in a surfer's beach, so, what kind of swimmers to we need to be in order not to die wallowed in the most accelerated times of history? Because our times not just demand people that can easily get adapted to change —that was fine for the 80's; nowadays to reach high levels of success and wellness, one needs to become a fan of change, not to just not resist it, but one needs to arouse and promote it.

In the feudal period to possess the land was the most important, throughout the Industrial Revolution everything was about producing more, but in our times the maximum differentiating factor is the innovative intelligence.

When I talk about innovation I talk of the capacity to explore, break the rules, create options and transform worlds, I speak of divergent and creative thought focus on the creation of the new.

The Innovative intelligence is the capacity of people, teams and societies to launch changes that generate success and wellness.

People and teams without innovative intelligence, are wallowed.

In this case the world of innovation does not look like the one of sex, on the contrary, in sexuality the best is to wallow, but in innovation the wallowed ones are the ones that suffer from innovative frigidity, that is, the ones that do not enjoy change, that kept trap in the past, or that were ran over a paradigm change or the tsunami of a given market.

That is why facing the fastest times in the history of humanity, you and I and our teams only have three choices on our plates: To be wallowed and drowned, to become surfers, or to become creators of the waves.

Talking about yourself, in what part of the wave you are?

And your company?

WIPEOUTS

It's curious, but many people, companies, cities and countries that are wiped out today, were very successful in their time, if there is something that the wave punishes is arrogance.

When we say We're really bad! No one can make it against us!, we're just ready to be wipe out, don't believe me? Just ask Ms. Kodak, she was super successful and didn't want to change, she rested on her laurels, and the wave ran on her, and the wipe out was so bad that she died.

Not only businesses are affected by the speed of the wave, for instance, life expectancy in 4000 B.C. was just 20 years and nowadays it is 67.2 and the expectative is that by 2030 it will be of 78.1 in men and of 85.3 in women. That means:

When marriage was established

for the whole life people just live 20 years.

And if the tendency keeps on, we will soon be celebrating uranium or plutonium anniversaries instead of the silver or golden ones.

The innovation wave spouses' roles have changed, as well as economics inside marriage, the amount of children to have, the world in which children are educated, the kind of city in which you live and taboos about sexuality. How could a couple find good levels of satisfaction in the era of innovation following the same relationship models from the Middle ages or the Victorian Times?

To that personal health problem and business health, that consist of not being able to enjoy change, is what I call innovative frigidity.

If we don't want to be wipe out by the wave is important that we go for a checking up, because if we suffer from innovative frigidity we have the same risk that a person with hypertension to get a cardiac arrest.

Innovative frigidity is a common and silent illness. It is suffered by very successful people that without realizing get ill little by little of innovative frigidity. Each day there are more and more companies that as Ms. Kodak die because of this.

O.K. well, I don't want to scare you, maybe all of this doesn't have to do with you at all, however you'd better check if you have any of the following symptoms:

Rigidity: With your spouse, it is not easy to change your opinions nor to give in or take risks, and in your company? Well, is just the same.

Frequent nostalgia: You live in the past.

Predictability: You use to make love always with the same prelude, in the same position and saying the same things and even moans. In the company your meetings and proposals are the same, pretty boring by the way.

Arrogance: You take for granted you are the best spouse and you never ask if you could change anything. At work, you never ask for feedback, you think you are too good to learn from others.

One of the most common phrases said by people who suffer from innovative frigidity is: I know that, We have tried that already, Let's get back to the basics Do you remember how were those times? Nothing is going to happen, this business is the way it is, it will never change.

From 0 to 10, how much do you suffer from these symptoms? How much of rigidity, arrogance, or nostalgia has seized you or your team?

If you are above 7 in any of the three symptoms, watch out! you suffer from innovative frigidity and you are at a high stake of being wiped out.

Apply all of the exercises in this book, and if the problem persists, ask to see a specialist.

SURFERS

People and companies who surf are the ones that turn their heads to see the wave and say: This is what's coming, This is the trend and get on it. Let's say that the surfers are followers that ride on the wave. Think about a university that is making research about what is done in other countries, then it copies the model; it is not leading the innovation, but at least it is not getting behind. Just imagine that a new restaurant model just arrives to town, and that there are many surfers that see this trend and ride on the wave, while there are many other restaurants that are unable to see anything and that little by little start to lose their clientele.

Surfers see what is coming, copy and get adapted.

I don't mean that being a surfer is bad at all, even Pablo Picasso used to say that one learns to create by coping or better: An artist not just copies, steals.

It seems to me that Picasso copied the reality until it was deconstructed and he recreated his own version; just look his deconstructed copy of Las Meninas from Velázquez:

Picasso started being an extraordinary painter, but not an innovator one. It was at age 11 that he was admitted in The School of Fine Arts in la Coruña Spain and at 14 in the one of Barcelona, where he went through the entrance exam in a single day. Technically, he was extraordinary, but not an innovator yet; he took years to find himself and to create a wave that still refreshes us, that is why he said that his first drawings lacked the ingenuity and awkwardness of a child. This is where his famous phrase come from: At 12, I painted like the best of the Renaissance, but it took me the rest of my life to relearn to paint like a child. I would say that Picasso was an amazing surfer at 12, but he took 50 years in becoming the creator of the wave of cubism.

Just like Picasso, the idea of copying shouldn't be of just surviving or earning a couple of bucks, but to learn, learning to later contribute with your own stuff. As a result, if you stay in copying, you would get stuck in the follower level:

Yet, if you copy to learn, you will be like the painter becoming little by little in an artist.

Surfer is much better than wiped out undoubtedly. However, copying is not the highest aspiration we can reach, the highest level of ecstasy, the orgasm of innovation, arrives once you get the risks to go to the next level.

THE CREATORS OF WAVES

The attitude that generates innovative orgasms

Sometimes I think that maquila labor, routinely labor, or robotic should be paid triple, because they are boring, and do not give too much food for thought; at least they should pay well to have your brain getting dry up.

Creation jobs, like inventing products, making strategies, art or writing should not be paid, because making them is already rewarding, however, it is great that is just the other way around!

What I mean is that the jobs where you are just an executer, have lower levels of satisfaction than the ones in which you participate in the process of creation.

The necessary energy for creation is of erotic nature

—Sigmund Freud

To create the wave is the most delicious part of your labor life, just like sex is one of the most delicious parts of life. In fact, here is where innovation looks more similar to sex, because sex symbolizes creativity, furthermore, both things, sex and innovation have to do with passion, with enjoyment and giving birth.

A healthy and active sexuality let us feel fulfill, strengths our immunology system, diminishes blood pressure, reduces stress levels, the risks of cardiac arrest, increases self-esteem and give us vitality, the same as a person that is participating in innovation processes feels useful, fulfilled and fully satisfied.

Without a satisfactory sexual life, you feel frustrated, crabby, in a bad mood and you project that, the same as a job that is routine, boring and without the chance of creation you feel empty and just with the motivation to wait for the weekend, or vacations.

Nowadays, in sexuality, I think we look for having the highest levels of pleasure and satisfaction regulating the amount of children —if we decide to have them— because the world currently does not give the chance to many couple to say Hey, let's have five or ten children besides projects of life are very diverse. In sexuality we have discovered enjoyment without reproduction. And in this case, in innovation it is applied the other way around: We will have the children that God send us, because it is about creating, experimenting, piloting, and to have many, many children.

In innovation, don't use contraceptives.

And that's the feeling, just like when you create a company, write a book, develop an App, game, video, product, or campaign, is just like when you have a child, with the difference that you don't love them so much, but with the advantage that instead of spending in diapers, the children of creativity give you royalties.

From now on, every time they ask you how many children you have, you can say: Two children, 10 paintings, and two sculptures or Three children, two businesses, and 10 branches. I would reply A daughter, nine books, eight games, a company and an App, plus all the children that want to come; however I have to confess that I have been a bad father, because I had two uncomfortable children which I wrote when I was very young and that I discontinue because, to be honest, I feel ashamed of their content.

It was all my fault, they were premature children, and I was anxious to publish.

It is such the degree of wellness that is produce by creating that millennials are willing to sacrifice a little of their economical aspirations just to work in projects that implied alternative thinking, and an experience in which they can contribute with creativity; the millennials are allergic to boring jobs.

If we broaden the vision, we will see that give yourself to creation, trying and testing new formulas, not only generates temporary wellness and comfort, but also give us the best economical results. Yet in our world to create a formula and to pretend living from it the rest of life is unsustainable. What is about today's To create in the creation's culture new formulas permanently.

That is why, when I think, Why is so freaking important to increase the innovative intelligence? these phrases come to my mind:

To be creators, instead of stressed-wipeouts; to be followed instead of being chased.

To flow in a time of high speed.

To avoid getting bored, nor in our sexuality, nor in our jobs.

To be and make a difference.

And most of all to have a life with the highest levels of accomplishment. A life that is multi creative, multi orgasmic and with multi profitable business children. A life where our creation potential is set free.

These terms tell us why to innovate, on the whole they show us the consequences of the innovative frigidity and the possible impacts of creating the wave, but let's land this in your challenge.

When winds of change blow, some rise walls, and other build wind mills.

—Asian proverb