Introduction: The Bartender that Could

 

In the first segment, we’ll consider the power of ingenuity and why it changes the world. You can listen to the audio below. There is also a transcript if you would like to refer back to this segment.

Your mission is too important and your resources too precious.

Work with ingenuity!

 

 

 

 

 

Transcript Below: The transcript below is not meant to replace listening to the audio, but serves as a reference for post-listening learning. Please forgive any errors due to the skill level of the A.I. robot that created this transcript. 

 

00:10

This is Dave Fleming at the ingenuity lab. Think about the important work that you and your team and your organization do every day.

00:29

Every day when you get up, you get up to make a difference. No one wakes up in the morning and says, you know, today, I’m really shooting for mediocrity. Nope. We want to make a difference. We want to change the world, or at least our corner of it.

00:58

Now, how do you do this? How do you take the genius of the team, pull out the best ideas. Use the resources, you have to advance those ideas in hopes that those ideas, optimize through the resources that you have, will advance your mission. And then we all know that life and work shifts and changes almost day by day. And so we have to be able to adapt, we have to be able to drop fast and smart and continue the process, finding usable ideas, maximizing the resources we have and then adapting fast and smart along the way. Welcome to ingenuity matters, an audio program that walks you through just what ingenuity is, how to do it, and how to stimulate it on the teams that you lead. Your work is too important, your resources to precious find ingenuity to change your world.

03:01

It was a dark, rainy, cold damp Sunday night in Boston, Massachusetts. My wife and I were new to the city and we were exploring different places to eat and bars to visit. So we stopped in to what rapidly became our favorite small getaway. Just inside the city, the Audubon the Audubon was a small cool vibed bar that had this long curved bar where you could sit and then there was seating for a restaurant as well as outside seating. We walked in 530 on a Sunday night, footballs playing on the televisions, and there is absolutely no one at the bar. Except Tyler. Tyler smiled from behind the bar greeted us. Just in the way we wanted to be greeted, we sat down at the bar and immediately felt like Tyler was our friend. He was young, he was ambitious. He was a mixologist, an alchemist with alcohol, his ability to understand different types of tastes and liquids and mixes and how to pair them with food was unbelievable to watch. My wife had recently had a drink that she said to Tyler..

Hey, can you make this and he said, Oh, I think we’re out of that particular alcohol but he said Have no fear. And he started pouring in mixing in shaking and doing all the things that a bartender does. And a couple minutes later, he presented to my wife a different drink. But that’s sad. fight her, if not at the same level, at a higher level than the drink she had in her imagination. I sat sipping Maul back.

And I said, So, Tyler, you really get into this. And he said, Oh, you have no idea. He said, My passion is to find a way to create for people who walk in that door, and experience with drink and food that they will remember for days, weeks and months. And he said, and I’ll never forget this, I smiled as he said it, I work to create just what the customer wants. Even if we don’t have the ingredients, I work to take what we do have, and turn it into a drink that satisfies what the customer is looking for. As I put my drink down, I smiled and thought, there it is, there it is, again, there it is another example of ingenuity. Another example of taking what you have turning it into what you need to advance what matters to you. Ingenuity is one of the Uber skills of human beings.

It’s not that other animals don’t have an ability to be ingenious. But human beings have taken ingenuity to an art form, the way we can arrange elements in order to alchemize our world, to make a difference in the world, to take the limited resources we have and turn them into what it is that we need in any given moment. So that from that moment, we can advance life and work in meaningful ways. is a beauty to watch when it happens, and is one of the highest skills you can bring to your own personal life. And to those you lead. In this audio program, I’m going to give you a tour of ingenuity. What is ingenuity? How does it work? And what are the behaviors that are present in individuals and teams, when they are in genius, when they are utilizing their resources to advance their mission in creative and powerful ways. Nothing could be more important than spending your life energy on things that matter to you, and matter to others.

08:01

And nothing is more exhilarating than the creative use of your resources to make that happen. Your work and your life matter. Utilize your energy and your resources to create solutions that are both clever, timely, and necessary. And watch not only the world around you change, but watch the world within you change. Because when we are ingenious as individuals, and organizations, what we put our hands to does change the world. It also changes our ability to live meaningful lives, where we know that we have put our hands to something that matters, and we were part of making the magic happen. So just like Tyler, you have your resources. Are you ready to optimize them and maximize them in a way that allows you to become the Alchemist of your own world. Close your eyes and come with me now. Like you’re stepping on to a ride at Disneyland. You sit down, the bar comes back. You hold on. And I’m about to take you on a tour of the Uber skill of ingenuity, the skill that changes the world. The skill that drives you Innovation, the skill that changes the daily work we do and turns it into our legacy.  Are you ready?