How are you doing today? I hope your weekly activities went well. These days, it’s so easy to be fixated on how difficult things are that we lose sight of the big picture and miss opportunities right before us. So, I thought it would be nice to start this week’s newsletter by reminding us that tough times birth innovation. And in case you are wondering, innovation is about a new way of doing things. When we apply new processes or develop new techniques to solve existing problems, we are innovating.

Generally, when motivational speakers want to get people to think about innovation, they often tell them to look inward. Well, I am not a motivational speaker. I am a politician who, in his first life, built a business out of thinking of new ways of doing things. So, my advice would be to look outwards. It is in understanding our external environment and identifying where ideas and solutions intersect that we innovate.

In line with the aforementioned, my next reading is about innovative thinking. A father and his son co-authored the book. Don Tapscott, the father, is a one-time chancellor of Trent University and one of the most influential management thinkers in the world. He writes about technology, business, and society, while his son, Alex Tapscott, is a capital markets professional. His work focuses on how emerging technologies, such as blockchain, impact business, government and society. Their book is titled, “Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies Is Changing the World”.