Well that depends.

If you are self motivated, entrepreneurial, intelligent and innovative, your ideas are probably worthless. Yes, you heard me. Within an organization, your ideas might be worthless. Of course they are regarded as valuable, however, most of the time they are translated into a similar, sometimes even worse idea of which someone more senior takes ownership and credit for.

I JUST read Tyler’s article on sharing ideas in a more entrepreneurial and self-sustainable environment. I just want to note that he’s views are a more ‘external’ perspective and are always going to happen. One only speaks to others about business ideas if you trust them to not exploit them. It is difficult to know who to trust, however, it is also necessary to trust.

Within an organization it is quite similar, the only difference is that everyone is in the same team, be it cross-functional departments, cross-level positions or friendly colleagues. Everyone strives for one goal, and that is the growth, expansion and financial success of the bread winner. The company paying your bills. I for one, do it for the satisfaction of being apart of something great and then comes the success. Within a company, ideas should not be locked up in a vault, they should be put on post-its, written on foreheads, yelled across the office and sent in bulk mails to the entire organization.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that there are many people that are mini descendants of Robert Mugabe and Adolf Hitler in a more corporate sense, they are the people who lack originality and respect for their colleagues. These are the people that Tyler talks of, the people capitalizing on our ideas, using it to their own benefit and taking credit for it. If it were only possible to tag spoken words and link them to various people (like blogs) this problem would be solved, unfortunately, spoken conversations are not digital.

    

I would say that trust in an organization is a lot more vital than outside of one, however, it is a lot more difficult to accomplish. Who do you trust, either way your idea will be taken, altered and formulated into something else that serves the exact same purpose in a different way, and generally in a more inaccurate way. Instead of brainstorming together, everyone seems to be in it for the glory. What a shame. It destroys innovation and especially motivation.

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