Those of you who know me know that I tend to have a lot of different things going on at one time. I joke that it stems from my entrepreneurial attention deficit as well as the old adage “If you want something done, give it to a busy person”. Like many other busy people I know, I actually do better when I have more to do. I guess it forces me to be organized and not procrastinate.

As my activities and passions have evolved, however, I’ve made a most exciting discovery: these seemingly random things I do actually work together. In fact, with my new company, Path Forward International, these passions collide and combine in a most serendipitous way. My Shiny Penny Hell(TM) is congealing into a cohesive strategy that not only both my partner Renee and I are thrilled with, but seems to resonate with our target market as well.

My first passion is creativity. Specifically, entrepreneurial thinking as it relates to innovation. I didn’t get my new title Chief Muse for nothing, after all. That title was actually given to me by my students when one after another commented on how I helped them come up with fresh new ideas or see their situation in a new light. We’ve taken the creative, idea-generation processes that we’ve been teaching for almost 5 years to entrepreneurs and developed the first phase of our 3-phase “Get It” innovation process, Get Sparked, where we help you get to Shiny Penny Hell(TM).

I LOVE ideas, but even more sexy are ideas that are actually opportunities (if you don’t get the difference, you need to attend one of my classes or workshops!). This is where the second phase, Get Real, comes in – getting out of Shiny Penny Hel(TM)l with the best opportunities. Again, this process is taken from our years of teaching this process to an international audience: how to not only determine which ideas have the highest probability of success but going one step beyond that: how to present them to stakeholders to gain buy-in. Companies view this particular twist as a real value-added bonus in developing their most promising young leaders.

The third step really comes from my partner, Renee’s, passions: accountability. Called Get Results, it’s about realizing opportunities all the way down to your bottom line. It is about execution: the phase where so many new innovations fail. She’s a master at tools and processes for accountability, providing our trademarked “Boot in the Butt” to help make things happen.

Over the past few months, we’ve realized that two of our other passions unexpectedly play very well into the innovation process described above: technology and women’s empowerment. I’ll describe those connections in my next blog.