Integrity? Insight? Innovation?

Posted by admin on August 9, 2008 under uFunctional Values | Be the First to Comment

The short uFunctional tagline is “Integrity, Insight, Innovation.” Just because it’s a trite, corporate-sounding cliché doesn’t mean I didn’t give it some thought.

It summarizes the flow of a successful consulting engagement.

Integrity means seeing and discussing the facts as they are, without any hidden agendas. Part of my role is to be trustworthy myself, and help this happen. Even though we’ll probably begin our conversation with a technical topic, I’ll also be intentionally building a relationship based on integrity.

Insight means seeing the same facts in a new way. It’s the A-HA that heralds a new-found sense of understanding, confidence, and possibility.

Innovation means following a new course of action and getting different (and hopefully better) results.

Here comes another cliché. There are no shortcuts.

Without integrity, there can be no insight. New ideas might sound, feel, and be trumpeted as insights, but they probably aren’t.

Without insight, we can act, even with great forcefulness, but innovation is an unlikely matter of luck (and without integrity, we might not even see and embrace the good).

Without innovation, we won’t change even though the world is changing, and we won’t improve, even though there’s always room for improvement.

In business, the doors to most prisons are locked from the inside. The key is integrity. Insight and innovation will follow.