I’ll be frank: I had my doubts that I could pull it off, and as things do have a tendency to happen as your expectations have led them to, the entries for the forum overwhelmingly happened in the final hours before the submission deadline. But they DID happen, and we nearly tripled the articles from the first time around. Reinvention seems to be a scary word for a lot of people; it ranks right up there with, gulp, “change.” If not scary, it’s intimidating, something you think that you could never do, for it takes someone else with a bigger, revolutionary kind of innovative idea, someone brilliant, …but surely not you. For many, reinvention implies you have to start from scratch and be an Einstein-like inventor, or be an incredibly brave idealist. Not true. Learning to reinvent little by little is a way of grooming your own potential for leadership initiative. Your idea doesn’t have to be completely original; we can all reinvent by putting our personal signature on an idea we love which may already exist. There is an incredible amount of unmet opportunity dormant in the wasteland of unsupported ideas which were abandoned by those who weren’t tenacious enough, or who feared making mistakes when they didn’t need to. Sometimes we reinvent to fix an irritation. I admit this is where my own contributions to the Reinvention Forum happened with the articles I’d written on Human Resources and compensation design. Irritations become very hopeful, positive and proactive within an enthusiastic and optimistic effort to reinvent the processes associated with them. Think of the way a pearl is created around a grain of sand which has become an irritation in an oyster, or the way a talented muralist transforms a wall which previously attracted too much graffiti. Reinvention is something we can all do. The only question is if we will. For me, the word reinvention is not at all intimidating. It has other connotations. An easy way to groom more creativity. The willingness not to give up on something promising, but still slightly flawed. The opportunity to collaborate with others on synergistic effort, uncovering a third alternative; not mine, not yours, but something better entirely. The triumph of our human capacity to make things matter. And as far as virtual communities go, a forum meant to be where people don’t just complain, they generously seek to offer solutions.

Visit our Reinvention Forum on Talking Story and you will see what I mean. Add your own thoughts and comments to help us flesh out our ideas. Counting this post, you have 21 different opportunities to do so. Here is a run-down of the topics you’ll find there. I fully intend to have a Reinvention Forum again. Perhaps you’ll be there as a contributing author the next time, telling us about your own reinvention success story. I hope so; there is a wealth of potential just waiting for its day in the sun, and its got your name on it.

  1. Reinventing Brainstorming at Work 2. In search of a job spec that inspires 3. Reinventing Business, Making the Transition from Advertiser to Facilitator 4. Employee Evangelism 5. Coyote and Jackalope 6. How to Kill Creativity 7. Robots R Us: Crisis in Customer Service 8. Manifesting Possibility 9. The Most Valuable 10% of your Job Description 10. Meeting Planner | Organizer | Worksheet 11. The Resistance 12. Want to be a great place to work? 13. Why do young leaders leave organizations? 14. Vaporizing Limitations 15. Information Sharing: Don’t Hoard your Knowledge 16. Passion for the Good Customer Experience: Circle Recognition 17. A Reinvention Revolution; 3 Sacred Cows to Start With 18. The Reinvention of Human Resources 19. Got a job to fill? Tell it like it is 20. Great Project to consider: A Compensation Overhaul Articles Referenced here: Reinventions at Work and in Business: a Ho‘ohana Community Forum Synergy: The Third Alternative Looking for Leadership – any ideas? From Mistake to Marvel Rosa Say is the author of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii’s Universal Values to the Art of Business and the Talking Story blog. She is also the founder and head coach of Say Leadership Coaching, a company dedicated to bringing nobility to the working arts of management and leadership. Rosa’s Previous Thursday Column was: And the Survey says?