If we want to seriously address the climate crisis, then we need to encourage foolish business ideas.
When it comes to seemingly impossible problems like the climate crisis, Professor William Barnett says we need to reach for equally impossible solutions — ideas so crazy, they just might work. “Foolishness,” he says, “is the price of genius.”
A professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Barnett is equally interested in how organizations produce innovation. According to him, organizations need to embrace failure as a stepping stone to big breakthroughs and create cultures that encourage unconventional and even "foolish" ideas. “Ideas might well be foolish, but if they're right, they're going to be genius. Organizations that create lots of foolishness also create a lot of genius.”
In this episode of If/Then: Business, Leadership, Society, Barnett unpacks how farfetched thinking could be the key to addressing climate change, and how organizations can foster the cultures necessary to fail forward and find innovative solutions.
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William P. Barnett, The Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations at Stanford Graduate School of Business and professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
If/Then is a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business that examines research findings that can help us navigate the complex issues we face in business, leadership, and society.
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