6 Steps to Cultivating Purpose-Driven Leadership

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

Purpose-driven leaders have a higher purpose in life. Rather than solely focusing on self-interest, purpose-driven leaders consider the greater good of the community, society, and the planet. They live their values and beliefs, pursue their higher calling, know what they can contribute to the world, and move faithfully and persistently toward a compelling purpose. They help their employees find personal meaning in their work and foster a happy workforce that thrives on shared values. They create a shared sense of direction, alignment, and commitment, fostering innovation, greater performance, and belonging in the organization. They also cultivate alignment of the personal purpose of their employees with the shared company purpose to create uniformity of personal and organizational values. In this way, they foster better ethics in the organization to become a purpose-driven company by encouraging their employees to formulate their personal purpose and reflect on aligning their personal purpose with the shared company purpose to help them find their higher purpose and cultivate a good character. In this way, they create sustainable organizations that can succeed in the long term without exploiting scarce resources in the short term.

A Holistic Framework for Cultivating Purpose-Driven Leadership

In this article, I propose a holistic framework for cultivating purpose-driven leadership that fosters sustainable innovation, as shown in below diagram. The framework includes several key elements, such as fostering authenticity, integrity, and a sense of purpose and empathy among leaders and employees, cultivating sustainable innovation, and integrating sustainability into the company’s business activities. By following this framework, companies can create a culture that benefits their bottom line and contributes to the greater good and leaders and employees in these companies will be genuine and true to themselves.

This model is based on my latest book, “Eco-Design Thinking for Personal, Corporate, and Social Innovation.” It will aid companies to cultivate a purpose-driven culture and create a stable foundation for sustainable innovation. Below, I will elaborate on each of these six stages in the model.

1. Personal Purpose

Having a higher purpose in life means you’re living your values and beliefs. Finding your higher purpose or finding your higher calling is discovering who you are, what you stand for, what matters to you, and what you can contribute to the world. When someone feels that his life lacks purpose, he may struggle to find motivation and direction. This can lead to a sense of detachment from his values and a lack of inspiration to enrich his life and those around him. Finding motivation and direction can be easier when you have a purpose in life. This will inspire you to become more effective, ethical, and fulfilled. Having a purpose in life will inspire you to discover ways to become more creative, imaginative, and innovative. Life is never richer, fuller, or more rewarding than moving faithfully and persistently toward a compelling purpose. Remember what Elon Musk said: “Don’t even attach yourself to a person, a place, a company, an organization, or a project. Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose only. That’s how you keep power and your peace. It worked pretty well for me this far”.

Your personal purpose entails your identity (mission) and dream (vision). Your dream is related to a higher calling. Everyone has a higher calling, a so-called inner assignment. Personal mission is aimed at being, and personal vision is aimed at becoming. Your personal mission inspires you, and your personal vision motivates you. Your mission and vision statement (personal purpose statement) embodies your values. Your personal mission encompasses your philosophy of life and your overall objectives, indicating who you are, the reason for existence, why you are on earth, what your purpose here is, what you stand for, what values you are most committed to, what is decisive for your success, what is your life purpose, what do you live for, what are your core beliefs, what are your deepest aspirations, what makes you happy,  and what do you do that you are most proud of.  Your personal mission is your personal leading light, keeping you steadily in the course of your dream. “Who am I?” is an identity question. It initiates self-examination of your personal identity (the unique position you find yourself in) and a voyage of discovery. My mission is: “Enjoy the freedom to unleash the creative potential in others, especially if this can mean something in their life.”

Your personal vision statement is a description of how you want to realize your dream in the long term. It indicates where you are going, which values, beliefs, and principles guide you on your way, why you are involved in the design industry, what you want to achieve, what you desire for your life, what your long-term intentions are, what talents, skills and experiences you need to add value to your others, where you want to be at the end of your life, what you hope to become, where you would like your life to be headed, the ideal characteristics you want to possess, your perfect job situation, and what you desire to be. Ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly.

By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner self and find answers to these questions. This will help you to discover your higher purpose. Please click on this link to view my personal purpose statement. It also entails my values and beliefs. Read “How Mindful Meditation Boosts Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.

Through this process, you’ll cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning, which entails a journey toward personal disruptive innovation, as shown in this diagram:

The best ideas come when you are alone. Self-learning – the ability to gather, process, retain, and evaluate knowledge alone — is the foundation of creativity and imagination. Traditional creativity approaches lack imagination because they neglect self-learning and, because of this, fail to address complex problems. They heavily rely on group meetings and, therefore, miss opportunities to develop innovative and imaginative ideas. Nikola Tesla developed many innovative ideas while working alone for over thirty years. Similarly, Stephen Hawking made significant discoveries while confined to his wheelchair, and Isaac Newton famously discovered gravity while in social isolation. Remember Nikola Tesla’s statement: “Being alone is when ideas are born. This is the secret of innovation”.  Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living”.

2. Personal Innovation Strategy

To bring your purpose alive, you must translate it into measurable actions. Leaders and employees should formulate their personal innovation strategy to get their personal purpose to life. This is a roadmap to developing a growth mindset, authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. Without continuous improvement based on your personal innovation strategy, you won’t be successful in life and business. The following are the five steps to develop your personal innovation strategy:

Your personal innovation strategy helps you turn your personal purpose into manageable, measurable objectives and milestones in a balanced way. Using this strategy, you can effectively manage your time and become more disciplined, proactive, innovative, and empathetic. Please click on this link to view my personal innovation strategy. Suppose you want to learn more about this personal innovation strategy system. In that case, I recommend reading my articles “How to Redesign Your Life Based on Your Personal Innovation Strategy” and “Cultivating Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.”

3. Implementation According to the PDAC Cycle

Once you have established your personal innovation strategy, it is essential to consistently implement, maintain, and cultivate it to effectively manage and challenge yourself in your personal and company life. To aid you in this process, I recommend following the PDAC cycle (Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge), which is a continuous improvement cycle that will help implement your personal innovation strategy effectively, as illustrated in this diagram:

Implementing your personal innovation strategy through the PDAC cycle will lead to self-awareness, happiness, personal disruption, and enhanced authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. It’s important to regularly update your personal innovation strategy and repeat the cycle to stay current with new challenges and lessons learned. These 50 tips will assist you in implementing your personal innovation strategy effectively.

4. Aligning Personal Purpose with Personal Behavior 

The next stage ensures harmony between your purpose and actions, aligning your deeds with your conscience. Our conscience is the inner voice that guides us to distinguish between right and wrong, fact and fiction. By listening to this voice, we can gain better insight into our empathic behavior, strengths, and weaknesses, ultimately impacting our solidarity with others. Albert Schweitzer once said: “The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity and empathy with other human beings.” This diagram illustrates this personal integrity concept.

“Empathy is the key to innovate sustainably. Personal integrity is the foundation of empathy. The higher one’s personal integrity, the more empathetic he becomes. This leads to sustainable innovations”– Hubert Rampersad.

To enhance empathy and personal integrity, aligning your personal purpose with your behavior is essential. This involves achieving more excellent compatibility between the two elements so that they are in harmony, as shown in the above diagram. When your personal purpose and behavior match, you can work authentically and purposefully without internal conflicts. This will lead to greater empathy, enhanced charisma, transparency, and trustworthiness.

Personal integrity and empathy

I advise leaders and employees to balance their personal purpose with their current behavior and actions to develop personal integrity and empathy. During this alignment process, they must reflect honestly on the following questions: What are my personal values, and how do they align with my actions? How can I ensure that my actions are consistent with my values? What are the potential consequences of my efforts toward others? How can I empathize with others and understand their perspectives? Am I staying true to my values and conscience in my actions? Are my thoughts and actions aligned consistently? How do my values and intentions relate to my current behavior? Is there congruity between my thoughts and my actions? Am I always acting according to my personal ambition and empathetic nature? Does my personal purpose reflect my desire to work with ethics and empathy? Are there any discrepancies between my personal purpose and my compassionate actions? Do I keep the promises I make to myself? How do others perceive me and my values? Do they see me as someone who stays true to my core beliefs and remains authentic to myself? They must also ask themselves: Have I always acted by my conscience? Have I always done what was right? Have I always worked morally? Have I performed compassionately regularly?

5. Shared Company Purpose

The shared company purpose statement differs from a personal one, but the fundamental principles remain the same. The shared company purpose entails the company mission, vision, and core values to inspire leaders and employees toward a common goal. The mission encompasses the company’s identity, while the vision is its long-term dream, based on several core values used to strengthen the single-mindedness of its people. The related questions are included in this below diagram:

Look at SpaceX’s and Tesla Inc.’s shared purpose statement.

6. Aligning Personal Purpose with Shared Company Purpose

Aligning personal purpose with shared company purpose creates uniformity of personal and organizational values. Matching these two purposes involves reaching a higher compatibility between personal and company objectives and mutual value addition. To foster better ethics in the organization and become a purpose-driven company, I encourage leaders and employees to formulate their personal purpose and reflect on aligning their personal purpose with the shared company purpose, as shown in this Figure. This will help them to find their higher purpose and cultivate a good character.

Leaders must communicate their personal purpose to their employees and coach them in this alignment process. By unifying the shared company purpose with their personal purpose, you will create a strong foundation of peace, integrity, engagement, and learning upon which creativity, productivity, and growth can flourish, and life within the company will become a more harmonious and ethical culture. This will catalyze innovation by encouraging a learning culture of curiosity and exploration in the organization. This process is about getting the optimal fit and balance between these activities to enhance productivity, create a climate of trust, and cultivate a purpose-driven tech company. This process is needed because leaders and employees don’t work, study passionately, or expend energy on something they do not believe in or agree with. If there is an effective match between their interests and those of the company, and if their values and the institution’s values align, they will be actively engaged and motivated. This will create trust, and they will work with outstanding commitment and dedication toward realizing the company’s objectives. When their personal purpose is in harmony with the shared purpose (are compatible) and combined in the best interest of both parties, the results will be the good character of leaders and employees, restoration of their higher purpose, trust, engagement, collective sense of belonging, and cultivation of innovation and sustainability. In this way, they are stimulated to commit, act ethically, and focus on those activities that create value for the company, themselves, and others.

Purpose Meeting

I recommend introducing a purpose meeting between leaders and their employees to build a sustainable higher-purpose culture. This meeting is a periodical, informal, voluntary, trusted, and confidential meeting of half an hour between the parties, aligning the personal purpose with the shared purpose as a topic. The purpose meeting also includes individual coaching. It is recommended to be held structurally at least once every two months. The leader plays a crucial role in this process. He/she should be an empathetic, trusted leader, coach, mentor, and role model. This approach fosters ethical awareness among leaders and employees, creating a purpose-driven company. When they see their efforts as part of a greater purpose, they will be more likely to invest their creativity, passion, and energy into their work and work smarter.

A study by Towers Perrin found that instead of matching the right employee to the correct position for long-term success, most US companies and human resource departments emphasize simply filling the job as quickly as possible and on corrupt DEI policies, read “Why DEI Sucks; How to Measure and Fix DEI“. As a result, American companies are losing money as fast as they lose employees. Getting the optimal fit between personal and shared purpose has become necessary to enhance workforce productivity and stimulate creativity, learning, engagement, commitment, and passion.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

If you’re interested in gaining more knowledge about this program, you may want to consider joining our Orlando–Tampa Live Events:

Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Boeing Culture

Cultivating a Purpose-Driven and Design Culture in Tech Companies

How Sustainability and Generative AI Fuel Design Innovation

Cultivating Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI

 Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI 

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., is a Dutch-American innovation expert who founded the Center of Excellence in Human-Centered and Purpose-Driven Innovation in Orlando. He is a visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm“.

Orlando, Florida |  tpsi@live.com |  Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116 

5 Steps to Unlock Your Creative Potential

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D. 

Creativity is the ability to think about a problem in a new way and use imagination to come up with innovative ideas. Conventional creative processes often fail to ignite the necessary spark of imagination and critical thinking. Interestingly, the best ideas come when you are alone. Regrettably, many organizations prioritize theatrical group brainstorming sessions over genuine sustainable creativity development. It’s important to note that cozy meetings are not essential for generating innovative ideas. Creative potential is the ability to generate innovative ideas and solve problems innovatively.

Holistic model to unlock your creative potential

This article introduces a holistic model to unlock your creative potential and encourage personal growth and unconventional thinking. This model is based on my latest book, “Eco-Design Thinking for Personal, Corporate, and Social Innovation.” It involves five steps: 1. Personal Ambition, 2. Personal Brand, 3. Personal Innovation Strategy, 4. Implementation, and 5. Personal Integrity & Empathy. This model is illustrated below:

This model will help you develop visionary, imaginative, and empathetic thinking. Instead of thinking outside the box, you’ll think like there is no box. The key is to develop self-knowledge and self-learning to drive personal innovation, which can help you become more resilient and authentic and sharpen your authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. Remember that without self-knowledge, personal innovation, a strong mindset, and personal integrity, you won’t be able to succeed as an empathetic and disruptive innovator. This system will unlock your creative potential and imagination while honing your authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. It will guide your beliefs and actions, helping you discover your purpose in life and leading to a more fulfilling, content, and healthier life, personally and professionally.

Personal disruptive innovation is a system that helps you explore and redesign your life, build resilience, and develop your personal brand. It enables you to define your higher calling and discover your life’s purpose. Elon Musk once said: “Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose only. That’s how you keep power and your peace. It worked pretty well for me this far”. Using the personal disruptive innovation model, you can become a visionary, imaginative, and empathetic individual. This involves using self-learning to translate your self-knowledge into personal innovation and to develop skills such as resilience, authenticity, integrity, strategic thinking, and critical thinking, which are crucial in the AI era. This system will also help unleash your creative potential and imagination and will help you skillfully analyze information from observation, experience, reflection, and reasoning.

The model consists of the following five phases:

1. Personal Ambition: The initial step involves engaging in a reflective process that includes deep thinking, introspection, and self-reflection. This will also strengthen your critical thinking skills. During this phase, you’ll be introduced to breathing and silence exercises that will aid in developing self-awareness. Self-knowledge is the ultimate goal of this phase. The outcome of this phase will be the creation of your personal mission, vision, and key roles, as illustrated in the diagram below. Remember what Elon Musk said: “Don’t even attach yourself to a person, a place, a company, an organization, or a project. Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose only. That’s how you keep power and your peace. It worked pretty well for me this far”.  Your personal ambition statement also serves as the foundation of an innovative, creative, imaginative mindset. The figure below shows the personal ambition framework. Ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly.

By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner self and find answers to these questions. This will help you to discover your higher purpose. Through this process, you’ll cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning, which entails a journey toward personal disruptive innovation, as shown in this diagram:

The best ideas come when you are alone. Self-learning – the ability to gather, process, retain, and evaluate knowledge alone — is the foundation of creativity and imagination. Traditional creativity approaches lack imagination because they neglect self-learning and, because of this, fail to address complex problems. They heavily rely on group meetings and, therefore, miss opportunities to develop innovative and imaginative ideas. Nikola Tesla developed many innovative ideas while working alone for over thirty years. Similarly, Stephen Hawking made significant discoveries while confined to his wheelchair, and Isaac Newton famously discovered gravity while in social isolation. Remember Nikola Tesla’s statement: “Being alone is when ideas are born. This is the secret of innovation”.  Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living”.

Spirituality can play a vital role in eco-design thinking and innovation. It provides the intuition needed to make tough decisions and develop a higher level of consciousness. Elon Musk once said, “We should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness to understand better what questions to ask. The only thing that makes sense It is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.” By focusing inwardly and reflecting on your actions through self-examination with breathing and silence exercises, you can gain insights about yourself and your life’s purpose. This is what Einstein wanted to know.

You will also find out why you were born. This process will help you learn more about yourself and discover the truth about your life’s purpose. As Thomas Huxley said, “Learn what is true to do what is right.” This process enables you to learn more and discover the truth about yourself. By formulating personal ambition, you can initiate self-examination and prepare your mindset for critical thinking. As you become more conscious of yourself, gain more creativity, and become a critical thinker. The thinking process and mindset changes are meant to prepare you for action as a proactive, empathic, and ethical critical thinker. Based on insights acquired through this process, you will also become more self-assured and work smarter through self-learning and self-knowledge. You become more creative and innovative as you grow more conscious of yourself. The words of Galileo Galilei may also be recalled here—“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.”  Remember, the more you want to be innovative, the more you should develop self-knowledge. Read “How Mindful Meditation Boosts Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.”

By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner voice and find answers to the questions you seek. This requires tuning into the same wavelength as your spirit, which is closely linked to the concept of synchronicity. Synchronicity refers to meaningful coincidences or events that co-occur without apparent. It is the connection between the ‘inner world’ and the ‘outer world’; consciousness bridges these two dimensions. Synchronicity can manifest in many ways, and it is a phenomenon studied by psychologists such as Carl Gustav Jung and Nikola Tesla, who were also in sync with the universe. I am also acting like a receiver and tuned to the same frequency.

Your personal ambition comprises your mission, vision, and key roles. You can click on this link to view my personal ambition statement. Having a clear purpose is crucial to becoming a visionary. Elon Musk’s vision is to contribute to the world’s shift from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources. According to Musk, the thing that drives him is vision. He said, “I think having an inspiring and appealing future is important. There must be reasons you get up in the morning and want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future?”

2. Personal Brand: In this phase, you will define and formulate an authentic, distinctive, memorable personal brand promise to strengthen your authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. This brand promise will be the focal point of your storytelling throughout each stage of my new proposed design process and your interaction with AI. Storytelling is an essential tool that can be used to engage with customers at different stages of the design process. Take the time to create your brand statement, ensuring it aligns with your ambition. Then, craft a compelling brand story to promote the brand called “You.” Elon Musk is an excellent example of a powerful personal brand and a brilliant storyteller. He emotionally connects with his audience by sharing his vision and passion for innovation. ChatGPT can assist you in creating compelling brand stories that resonate with your audience and convey your brand message effectively. This figure shows the seven steps to develop your authentic personal brand, which will strengthen your critical thinking skills. Following these steps, you can create a personal brand that reflects your values, strengths, and aspirations and helps you stand out in a crowded market. Read also “Crafting Your Authentic Personal Brand: A 5-Step Guide“. Please click on this link to view my personal brand statement. 

3. Personal innovation strategy: To bring your personal ambition to life, it’s crucial to act. This means creating a well-rounded action plan or personal innovation strategy based on your mission, vision, and key roles. A personal innovation strategy includes a roadmap to help you develop a stronger mindset and authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. Without continuous improvement based on your personal innovation strategy, you won’t be able to assist AI effectively, and this will not lead to your long-term growth and success. The following are the five steps to develop your personal innovation strategy:

Your personal critical success factors are the key elements of your ambition and objectives. These factors are broken down into four perspectives: internal, external, knowledge and learning, and financial. Your personal innovation strategy helps you turn your personal ambition into manageable, measurable objectives and milestones in a balanced way. Using this strategy, you can effectively manage your time and become more disciplined, proactive, innovative, and empathetic. If you want to learn more about this personal innovation strategy system, I recommend reading my article “How to Redesign Your Life Based on Your Personal Innovation Strategy.” This article provides valuable insights on how to stay on track and avoid becoming obsolete. It’s an excellent resource for anyone who wants to become a disruptor like Elon Musk. Please click on this link to view my personal innovation strategy. 

4. Implementation: Once you have established your personal innovation strategy, it is essential to consistently implement, maintain, and cultivate it to effectively manage and challenge yourself in your personal and business life. To aid you in this process, I recommend following the PDAC cycle (Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge), which is a continuous improvement cycle that will help your personal innovation strategy effectively, as illustrated in this diagram:

Implementing your personal innovation strategy through the PDAC cycle will lead to self-awareness, happiness, personal disruption, and enhanced authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. It’s important to regularly update your personal innovation strategy and repeat the cycle to stay current with new challenges and lessons learned. Continuous self-improvement is necessary to become a successful eco-design thinker like Elon Musk. These 50 tips will assist you in implementing your personal innovation strategy effectively.

5. Personal integrity & empathy: In this age of AI, it is essential to have personal integrity and empathy to assist generative AI systems effectively. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT have been known to inherit and perpetuate biases in training data, propagate hate speech and false information, and even generate content that could potentially raise copyright issues. To avoid these issues, it is crucial to reskill and upskill users to enhance their integrity and empathy skills. By demonstrating personal integrity, users can positively impact their relationships with AI and foster empathetic behavior. This figure illustrates this personal integrity concept:
AI users must balance their personal ambition with their current behavior and actions to develop personal integrity and empathy. Finding a balance between personal ambition and actions is crucial to achieving sustained personal integrity and empathy. During this alignment process, it is essential to reflect honestly on the following questions: What are my personal values, and how do they align with my actions? How can I ensure that my actions are consistent with my values? What are the potential consequences of my actions toward others? How can I empathize with others and understand their perspectives? Am I staying true to my values and conscience in my actions? Are my thoughts and actions aligned consistently? How do my values and intentions relate to my current behavior? Is there congruity between my thoughts and my actions? Am I always acting according to my personal ambition and empathetic nature? Does my personal ambition reflect my desire to work with ethics and empathy? Are there any discrepancies between my personal ambition and my empathetic actions? Do I keep the promises I make to myself? How do others perceive me and my values? Do they see me as someone who stays true to my core beliefs and remains authentic to myself?

To enhance empathy and personal integrity, aligning your personal ambition with your behavior is essential. This involves achieving more excellent compatibility between the two elements so that they are in harmony, as shown below. When your personal ambition and behavior match, you can work authentically and purposefully toward using AI systems without any internal conflicts. This will lead to greater empathy, enhanced charisma, transparency, and trustworthiness.

It is essential to ensure harmony between your personal ambition/brand and your actions to align your deeds with your conscience. Our conscience is the inner voice that guides us to distinguish between right and wrong, fact and fiction. By listening to this voice, we can gain better insight into our empathic behavior, strengths, and weaknesses, ultimately impacting our solidarity with others. Albert Schweitzer once said: “The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity and empathy with other human beings.” 

It takes constant awareness of how our actions affect other people, animals, plants, and the environment to achieve a balance between personal ambition and behavior. This entails encouraging social innovation and exercising social responsibility. Our ethical and compassionate conduct improves as we become more aware while our conceit and haughtiness diminish. In addition to offering a breathing and silent exercise, my book can encourage this attentiveness by having readers consider how their conduct and personal aspirations align. By doing this, we may improve and establish a solid personal brand. We must question ourselves honestly: Have I always acted by my conscience? Have I always done what was right? Have I always acted morally as an AI user? Have I acted compassionately regularly? Remember: “Personal integrity and honesty are two important values to uphold in the AI industry, but they differ. Honesty is about telling the truth to others, while personal integrity is about being truthful to yourself and staying true to your values and principles. It’s important to be honest with others, but it’s more important to be honest with yourself and live your life by your beliefs and values,” — Hubert Rampersad

Read also “Sustainable Innovation Fueled by Purpose-Driven Culture”.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

To gain more knowledge about this subject, you may consider attending his Orlando-Tampa Live Events:

Building a Purpose-Driven and Design-Driven Culture in Tech Companies

Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI

Cultivating Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.

Human-Centered AI Governance.

How Sustainability and Generative AI Fuel Design Innovation.

We also offer the Certified Authentic AI Leadership Coaching program. This program is appropriate for AI leaders, managers, and professionals who wish to strengthen their ethical leadership and critical thinking skills, drive their purpose and human-centeredness, and coach others to realize the same.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., founded the Center of Excellence in Human-Centered and Purpose-Driven Innovation in Orlando. He is a Dutch-American visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm“.

   

Orlando, Florida |  tpsi@live.com |  Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116

Boeing’s Top 10 Failures

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

Boeing lost its way. Other companies should take heed; “It’s become clear that Boeing’s problems run far deeper. They expose decades of American corporate philosophy gone awry. Boeing is a quintessential example of America’s rotting business culture over the past 40 years” (Markets Insider). Boeing focused on pleasing Wall Street because that’s how American executives believe companies should operate. The people who are at the top are there for a reason, and it’s basically to maximize shareholder value. Simply changing CEOs or hiring more engineers won’t make Boeing’s problems go away. The company needs to rethink its very reason for existing and what it should provide to society as an enterprise.  

Boeing’s trajectory has veered off course due to America’s deteriorating business culture, which prioritizes swift profits for shareholders over aircraft safety. This shift was initiated by Jack Welch approximately 40 years ago. The recent Boeing crisis lays bare years of flawed American corporate philosophy centered around shareholder interests. Lopez: “An entire generation of politicians and executives preached the doctrine of efficiency in the name of maximizing profits for shareholders, and we’ve seen the results: stagnant wages, massive inequality, legislators captured by industry lobbyists, and companies that coast on past innovation and financialization because it’s easier than investing in something new. As Boeing has been forced to reckon with the corporate culture it developed over the past 40 years, corporate America has been forced to face the long-term cost of its obsession with shareholder primacy and efficiency.” McGee: “Boeing is vital, but we don’t treat it like it’s vital. We treat it like a casino”. 

Former CEO Jim McNerney systematically promoted non-technical people to executive positions, particularly on the board. Incredibly, the MAX was developed under him and the commercial unit CEO — neither of whom had a technical degree. Former CEO Dave Calhoun, who is also not an engineer, has followed the same path, promoting people with similar financial backgrounds (left brain bookkeepers). This diagram shows Boeing’s top 10 failures.

Boeing’s Top 10 Failures

1. The board consists mainly of incompetent left-brain bookkeepers with no engineering background and no understanding of airline industry safety. How to revive.
2. The board prioritizes maximizing profits for shareholders and speed to meet deadlines over quality and aircraft safety. How to revive.
3. Board members lack a strategic and innovative vision and holistic thinking skills related to the airline industry. How to revive.
4. Safety is not a subject of board discussions; the board does not honestly and transparently address safety concerns and does not practice accountability. How to revive.
5. The company lacks a sustainable, purpose-driven ethical culture. How to revive.
6. The company does not control its supply chain effectively. How to revive.
7. Poor design methodology; non-holistic design approach and non-purpose-driven design culture. How to revive.
8. The company is merely treating the symptoms of the problems rather than addressing the root causes. How to revive.
9. Mental absence of assembly workers due to disengagement leads to a lack of critical thinking skills and many mistakes. How to revive.
10. Mismanagement; poor corporate governance, leadership, quality, and HR systems, outsourcing production of most critical parts, and layoffs of highly experienced engineers. How to revive.

Innovations fail at Boeing due to a lack of anchoring innovations in a purpose-driven corporate culture. The best innovations align with the innovator’s and company’s purpose and generate mutual value for its stakeholders. When innovations resonate with the employee’s and organization’s higher purpose and benefit the company, its employees, and key constituents, they are more likely to succeed and become sustainable. Purpose-driven tech companies are not only focused on profitability but also on making a positive impact on society. Their innovations are sustainable. This appears to be different at Boeing, read my article “How the Boeing 737 Max Incidents Could Have Been Avoided”.

These “10 Ways to Kill Creativity, Sustainability, and Innovation” apply to Boeing.

How to Fix it

In this article, I propose a holistic framework for building a purpose-driven culture at Boeing that fosters sustainable innovation. The framework includes several key elements, such as fostering authenticity, integrity, and a sense of purpose and empathy among leaders and employees, cultivating sustainable innovation, and integrating sustainability into the company’s business activities. By following this framework, Boeing can create a culture that benefits their bottom line and contributes to the greater good and leaders and employees in these companies will be genuine and true to themselves. I also refer to my article “5 Steps to Cultivate Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI”. All Boeing leaders and employees should follow these 5 steps to cultivate their authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills.

This article is based on my experience as a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and Europe’s most valuable tech firm.

HOLISTIC MODEL FOR BUILDING A PURPOSE-DRIVEN CULTURE AT BOEING

Boeing should not only prioritize profits but also promote high values, high character, and critical thinking among their leaders and employees. This will help them impact our society’s well-being, integrity, and empathy in a positive way. In this article, I provide a holistic model to realize this sustainably, as shown in this diagram. This model is based on my latest book, “Eco-Design Thinking for Personal, Corporate, and Social Innovation.” It will aid Boeing to avoid any new problems by cultivating a purpose-driven culture. Read also “The End of Design Thinking: Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Design Culture to Fix the World”. 

This holistic, never-ending, purpose-driven cycle entails six stages:

1. Developing the personal purpose of leaders and employees at Boeing entails the foundation for cultivating their authenticity, integrity, empathy, emotional intelligence, critical thinking skills, and character. Personal purpose is associated with ethical and emotionally intelligent individuals with a sense of direction. This will help them to work smarter and love their job.
2. Formulating the personal innovation strategy of leaders and employees; this strategy entails a roadmap to translate their personal purpose into measurable actions.
3. Implement and cultivate their personal innovation strategy according to the Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge cycle to continuously improve and purposely manage themselves to become creative, innovative, smart, and empathic.
4. Aligning the personal purpose of leaders and employees with their behavior and actions to cultivate their personal integrity and empathy skills; Remember: “The higher your personal integrity, the better your attentiveness, the better your empathic skills, the fewer mistakes you make”– Hubert Rampersad
5. Developing the shared company purpose is about what Boeing stands for, its reason, and how it benefits society. Shared purpose entails Boeing’s soul and joint mission, vision, and core values.
6. Aligning the personal purpose with the shared company purpose. This creates uniformity of personal and Boeing values. Matching these two purposes is essential for achieving an ethical, cohesive, unified company and a happy, engaged, committed, and passionate workforce. It’s about aligning the objectives of leaders and employees with those of Boeing, as well as fostering mutual value addition.

Below, I will elaborate on each of these six stages.

Personal Purpose

Having a higher purpose in life means you’re living your values and beliefs. Finding your higher purpose is discovering who you are, what you stand for, what matters to you, and what you can contribute to the world. When someone feels that his life lacks purpose, he may struggle to find motivation and direction. This can lead to a sense of detachment from his values and a lack of inspiration to enrich his life and those around him. Finding motivation and direction can be easier when you have a purpose in life. This will inspire you to become more effective, ethical, and fulfilled. Having a purpose in life will inspire you to discover ways to become more creative, imaginative, and innovative. Life is never richer, fuller, or more rewarding than moving faithfully and persistently toward a compelling purpose. Remember what Elon Musk said: “Don’t even attach yourself to a person, a place, a company, an organization, or a project. Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose only. That’s how you keep power and your peace. It worked pretty well for me this far”.

Your personal purpose entails your identity (mission) and dream (vision). Your dream is related to a higher calling. Everyone has a higher calling, a so-called inner assignment. Personal mission is aimed at being, and personal vision is aimed at becoming. Your personal mission inspires you, and your personal vision motivates you. Your mission and vision statement (personal purpose statement) embodies your values. Your personal mission encompasses your philosophy of life and your overall objectives, indicating who you are, the reason for existence, why you are on earth, what your purpose here is, what you stand for, what values you are most committed to, what is decisive for your success, what is your life purpose, what do you live for, what are your core beliefs, what are your deepest aspirations, what makes you happy,  and what do you do that you are most proud of.  Your personal mission is your personal leading light, keeping you steadily in the course of your dream. “Who am I?” is an identity question. It initiates self-examination of your personal identity (the unique position you find yourself in) and a voyage of discovery. My mission is: “Enjoy the freedom to unleash the creative potential in others, especially if this can mean something in their life.”

Your personal vision statement is a description of how you want to realize your dream in the long term. It indicates where you are going, which values, beliefs, and principles guide you on your way, why you are involved in the design industry, what you want to achieve, what you desire for your life, what your long-term intentions are, what talents, skills and experiences you need to add value to your others, where you want to be at the end of your life, what you hope to become, where you would like your life to be headed, the ideal characteristics you want to possess, your perfect job situation, and what you desire to be. All Boeing leaders and employees should ask themselves these questions and answer them honestly.

By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner self and find answers to these questions. This will help you to discover your higher purpose. Please click on this link to view my personal purpose statement. It also entails my values and beliefs. Read further “How Mindful Meditation Boosts Critical Thinking in the Age of AI” and “Crafting Your Authentic Personal Brand: A 5-Step Guide“.

Through this process, you’ll cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning, which entails a journey toward personal disruptive innovation, as shown in this diagram:

The best ideas come when you are alone.Self-learning – the ability to gather, process, retain, and evaluate knowledge alone — is the foundation of creativity and imagination. Traditional creativity approaches lack imagination because they neglect self-learning and, because of this, fail to address complex problems. They heavily rely on group meetings and, therefore, miss opportunities to develop innovative and imaginative ideas. Nikola Tesla developed many innovative ideas while working alone for over thirty years. Similarly, Stephen Hawking made significant discoveries while confined to his wheelchair, and Isaac Newton famously discovered gravity while in social isolation. Remember Nikola Tesla’s statement: “Being alone is when ideas are born. This is the secret of innovation”.  Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living”.

Personal Innovation Strategy

To bring your purpose alive, you must translate it into measurable actions. Boeing leaders and employees should formulate their personal innovation strategy to get their personal purpose to life. This is a roadmap to developing a growth mindset, authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. Without continuous improvement based on your personal innovation strategy, you won’t be successful in life and business. The following are the five steps to develop your personal innovation strategy:

Your personal innovation strategy helps you turn your personal purpose into manageable, measurable objectives and milestones in a balanced way. Using this strategy, you can effectively manage your time and become more disciplined, proactive, innovative, and empathetic. Please click on this link to view my personal innovation strategy. Suppose you want to learn more about this personal innovation strategy system. In that case, I recommend reading my article “How to Redesign Your Life Based on Your Personal Innovation Strategy”.

Implementation According to the PDAC Cycle

Once you have established your personal innovation strategy, it is essential to consistently implement, maintain, and cultivate it to effectively manage and challenge yourself in your personal and company life. To aid you in this process, I recommend following the PDAC cycle (Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge), which is a continuous improvement cycle that will help implement your personal innovation strategy effectively, as illustrated in this diagram:

Implementing your personal innovation strategy through the PDAC cycle will lead to self-awareness, happiness, personal disruption, and enhanced authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. It’s important to regularly update your personal innovation strategy and repeat the cycle to stay current with new challenges and lessons learned. These 50 tips will assist you in implementing your personal innovation strategy effectively.

Aligning Personal Purpose with Personal Behavior 

The next stage ensures harmony between your purpose and actions, aligning your deeds with your conscience. Our conscience is the inner voice that guides us to distinguish between right and wrong, fact and fiction. By listening to this voice, we can gain better insight into our empathic behavior, strengths, and weaknesses, ultimately impacting our solidarity with others. Albert Schweitzer once said: “The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity and empathy with other human beings.” This diagram illustrates this personal integrity concept.

To enhance empathy and personal integrity, aligning your personal purpose with your behavior is essential. This involves achieving more excellent compatibility between the two elements so that they are in harmony, as shown in the above diagram. When your personal purpose and behavior match, you can work authentically and purposefully without internal conflicts. This will lead to greater empathy, enhanced charisma, transparency, and trustworthiness.

Personal integrity and empathy

I advise Boeing leaders and employees to balance their personal purpose with their current behavior and actions to develop personal integrity and empathy. During this alignment process, they must reflect honestly on the following questions: What are my personal values, and how do they align with my actions? How can I ensure that my actions are consistent with my values? What are the potential consequences of my efforts toward others? How can I empathize with others and understand their perspectives? Am I staying true to my values and conscience in my actions? Are my thoughts and actions aligned consistently? How do my values and intentions relate to my current behavior? Is there congruity between my thoughts and my actions? Am I always acting according to my personal ambition and empathetic nature? Does my personal purpose reflect my desire to work with ethics and empathy? Are there any discrepancies between my personal purpose and my compassionate actions? Do I keep the promises I make to myself? How do others perceive me and my values? Do they see me as someone who stays true to my core beliefs and remains authentic to myself? They must also ask themselves: Have I always acted by my conscience? Have I always done what was right? Have I always worked morally? Have I performed compassionately regularly?

Shared Company Purpose

The shared company purpose statement differs from a personal one, but the fundamental principles remain the same. Boeing purpose entails the company mission, vision, and core values to inspire leaders and employees toward a common goal. The mission encompasses Boeing’s identity, while the vision is its long-term dream, based on several core values used to strengthen the single-mindedness of its people. The related questions are included in this below diagram:

Look at Boeing’s purpose statement:

Boeing mission statement is: “To connect, protect, explore, and inspire the world through aerospace innovation.” Boeing vision statement is “People working together as a global enterprise for aerospace industry leadership.” Boeing core values: “How We Operate; Start with engineering excellence; Be accountable; Apply Lean principles; Eliminate traveled work; Reward predictability and stability”.

Aligning Personal Purpose with Shared Company Purpose

Aligning personal purpose of Boeing leaders and employees with the shared Boeing purpose creates uniformity of personal and organizational values. Matching these two purposes involves reaching a higher compatibility between personal and company objectives and mutual value addition. To foster better ethics within Boeing and become a purpose-driven company, I encourage Boeing leaders and employees to formulate their personal purpose and reflect on aligning their personal purpose with the shared Boeing purpose, as shown in this Figure. This will help them to find their higher purpose and cultivate a good character.

Boeing leaders must communicate their personal purpose to their employees and coach them in this alignment process. By unifying the shared Boeing purpose with their personal purpose, you will create a strong foundation of peace, integrity, engagement, and learning upon which creativity, productivity, and growth can flourish, and life within Boeing will become a more harmonious and ethical culture. This will catalyze innovation by encouraging a learning culture of curiosity and exploration in the organization. This process is about getting the optimal fit and balance between these activities to enhance productivity, create a climate of trust, and cultivate a purpose-driven Boeing. This process is needed because leaders and employees at Boeing don’t work passionately, or expend energy on something they do not believe in or agree with. If there is an effective match between their interests and those of the company, and if their values and the institution’s values align, they will be actively engaged and motivated. This will create trust, and they will work with outstanding commitment and dedication toward realizing Boeing’s objectives. When their personal purpose is in harmony with the shared purpose (are compatible) and combined in the best interest of both parties, the results will be the good character of leaders and employees, restoration of their higher purpose, trust, engagement, collective sense of belonging, and cultivation of innovation and sustainability. In this way, they are stimulated to commit, act ethically, and focus on those activities that create value for Boeing.

Purpose Meeting

I recommend introducing a purpose meeting between Boeing leaders and their employees to build a sustainable higher-purpose culture. This meeting is a periodical, informal, voluntary, trusted, and confidential meeting of half an hour between the parties, aligning the personal purpose with the shared purpose as a topic. The purpose meeting also includes individual coaching. It is recommended to be held structurally at least once every two months. The leader plays a crucial role in this process. He/she should be an empathetic, trusted leader, coach, mentor, and role model. This approach fosters ethical awareness among Boeing leaders and employees, creating a purpose-driven company. When they see their efforts as part of a greater purpose, they will be more likely to invest their creativity, passion, and energy into their work and work smarter.

A study by Towers Perrin found that instead of matching the right employee to the correct position for long-term success, most US companies and human resource departments emphasize simply filling the job as quickly as possible and on corrupt DEI policies, read “Why DEI Sucks; How to Measure and Fix DEI“. As a result, American companies are losing money as fast as they lose employees. Getting the optimal fit between personal and shared purpose has become necessary to enhance workforce productivity and stimulate creativity, learning, engagement, commitment, and passion.

SUSTAINABLE INNOVATION

In today’s complex world, sustainable innovation is crucial. Traditional innovation approaches are inadequate because they lack a holistic approach. Instead, they are superficial, theatrical, and cozy. Technology companies should prioritize sustainable innovation as a fundamental capability to achieve sustainable growth and competitive advantage. Unfortunately, there are no real good examples of American tech companies focused on sustainable design innovation. Apple, Google, IBM, Samsung, Uber, Airbnb, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, OceanGate, Tesla, and SpaceX are not design-driven due to their poor design approach they learned at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. Read my article “Cultivating a Design-Driven Culture in Tech Companies“.

We must develop and implement innovative ideas better, faster, smarter, and sustainably. This is why I introduced the Eco-Innovation concept. Eco-Innovation involves integrating sustainability into the process of innovation. I identify three types of innovation that fall under this category:

• Personal innovation is unlocking your creative potential and creating new opportunities for yourself. By disrupting your current market, you can make a significant social impact. Personal Disruptive Innovation by Hubert Rampersad helps you find your higher purpose and improve your business and personal life for greater happiness and success. Combining personal disruptive innovation with corporate innovation and social innovation will help you generate more imaginative, innovative, empathetic, and disruptive ideas. “We need to understand that all knowledge starts with self-knowledge, all learning starts with self-learning, all innovation starts with self-innovation (personal innovation), real empathy starts with personal integrity, and without empathy, innovations are not sustainable ”- Hubert Rampersad
• Corporate innovation involves applying new ideas to create new products, processes, or services that increase the value of a company. Corporate innovation also encompasses Open Innovation by Chesbrough, Disruptive Innovation by Clayton Christensen, and BlockChain Innovation.
• Social innovation is developing and implementing new ideas and solutions that meet social needs and strengthen civil society. There is some overlap between social innovation and social entrepreneurship. Social innovation aims to improve the world by implementing innovative ideas that create social and environmental change, benefiting many people. Social entrepreneurs seek the most effective ways to achieve their social mission and provide social benefits.

The diagram below shows how personal, corporate, and social innovation are interconnected. Personal innovation is linked to self-learning, corporate innovation is linked to organizational learning, and social innovation is linked to community learning.

Traditional innovation approaches are unsuitable for a sustainable circular economy as they focus on process-driven, analytical thinking, cozy, theatrical meetings, and completing related tasks in a particular order using design tools. These approaches lack imagination and fail to address the larger picture. We must adopt a new design method better suited for sustainable innovation. I have therefore introduced eco-design thinking. This creative process involves empathizing with yourself, the end user, and the environment to generate innovative, imaginative, empathetic, and disruptive design ideas that are better aligned with social innovation. The new model is depicted in the figure below and consists of four stages: Explore, Ideate, Prototype, and Execute. It is an iterative, incremental, cyclic, and concentric process of exploring, ideating, prototyping, and executing (Rampersad, 2023). 

Eco-design thinking is a circular and iterative process that has no endpoint. The model consists of various stages that may form iterative loops and do not need to follow a specific sequence. Every iteration brings forth fresh insights. Eco-design thinking is a continuous and circular process that requires testing and refining your design while empathizing with yourself, the users, and the environment. Unfortunately, Boeing has ignored essential steps in this design model, with all the consequences that entails. Read “How the Boeing 737 Max Incidents Could Have Been Avoided”. Read also “How SDGs, ESG, and Purpose Fuel Design For Sustainability”.

The most important benefits of this new design model are: Before delving into corporate innovation issues, exploring and redesigning your own life to become innovative is essential, which leads to more empathetic, intelligent, and sustainable innovations that are in line with social innovation and the higher purpose of the company and its employees; A high level of personal integrity and a designer’s empathy is necessary to achieve superior design quality; By gradually building and enhancing the product and detecting defects early on, you can achieve better and more sustainable innovation outcomes.

Lopez: “Boeing can become better. The first step is believing that the state of Boeing is not a natural one — that it can be changed with conscious effort. We just have to choose a better way”.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

Complimentary Initial Consultation to Enhance Your Design Process and Boost Design Team Performance

If you’re interested in gaining more knowledge about this program, you may want to consider joining our Orlando–Tampa Live Events:

Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Boeing Culture

Building a Purpose-Driven Design Culture in Tech Companies

How Sustainability and Generative AI Fuel Design Innovation

Cultivating Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., is a Dutch-American innovation expert who founded the Center of Excellence in Human-Centered and Purpose-Driven Innovation in Orlando. He is a visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm“.

Orlando, Florida |  tpsi@live.com |  Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116 

10 Ways to Kill Creativity, Sustainability, and Innovation

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D. 

The world faces an abundance of complex problems that demand attention. To address these challenges, genuine creativity, sustainability, and innovation are required. Unfortunately, most corporate practices inadvertently hinder these essential elements, leading to uninspired results and design flaws. In this article, I delve into ten ways corporations inadvertently stifle creativity, sustainability, and innovation; the figure below illustrates these inhibiting factors.

Ten ways to kill creativity, sustainability, and innovation are:

1. Focus on innovation theater instead of sustainable innovation; neglect a holistic purpose-driven approach and keep it superficial, theatrical, and cozy. How to revive.
2. Neglect personal innovation and social innovation in the process of corporate innovation. How to revive.
3. Involve mainly left-brainers in the innovation process; systematically promote only non-technical bookkeepers on the board of directors, focusing on shareholder value rather than purpose-driven. How to revive.
4. Don’t look at the bigger context holistically; focus mainly on parts of the problem. How to revive.
5. Don’t be genuine, authentic, and empathic; don’t be human-centered and purpose-driven. How to revive.
6. Neglect genuine sustainability; focus on the symptoms rather than the root causes and neglect empathy. How to revive.
7. Make your design process linear and ad-hoc, with an endpoint; don’t make it a never-ending, non-linear, circular, iterative, incremental, cyclic, and concentric process. Neglect cultivating a purpose-driven design culture. How to revive.
8. Develop innovative and imaginative ideas by relying heavily on cozy and theatrical group meetings. Neglect critical thinking, and don’t be a loner. How to revive.
9. Don’t emphasize the designer’s imagination and disruption; focus on knowledge rather than imagination. How to revive.
10. Solve problems using the same thinking that created them. Don’t nurture authenticity, resilience, personal integrity, and an open growth mindset. How to revive.

The systematic killing of creativity, sustainability, and innovation within corporate environments is a matter of concern. It’s illustrated by my following articles: “Top-10 Causes of Bad Designs”.

“Boeing’s Top 10 Failures“

“Why OceanGate’s Design Approach Sucks”

“Why Creativity Sucks”

“How STEM Education is Failing in the Age of AI‘

“Things About Sustainability, Design Innovation, and Creativity You Don’t Learn at Universities.”

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

Orlando, Florida |  tpsi@live.com |  Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., founded the Center of Excellence in Design-Driven, Human-Centered, and Purpose-Driven Innovation in Orlando. He is a Dutch-American visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most crucial tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm.

   

Why Creativity Sucks

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D. 

Sustainable creativity fosters wise innovation in today’s intricate world and the AI age. Conventional creative processes often fail to ignite the necessary spark of imagination and critical thinking. Interestingly, the best ideas come when you are alone. Regrettably, many organizations prioritize theatrical group brainstorming sessions over genuine sustainable creativity development. It’s important to note that cozy meetings are not essential for generating innovative ideas. In fact, you tend to be more creative when working alone rather than in groups.

Creativity and critical thinking are crucial when dealing with AI. Creativity and critical thinking are two types of thinking that involve different skills and behaviors. Creativity is the ability to generate new ideas and solutions, while critical thinking is the ability to evaluate the validity and worth of existing ideas and solutions. Creativity is needed to develop intelligent AI algorithms that will help you distinguish between important and unimportant in a conversation with generative AI. By using critical thinking, we can improve our ability to effectively communicate, solve problems, build arguments, and draw conclusions when working with AI. Employees must be able to question AI-generated results, recognize possible limitations in the underlying data, and be aware of potential biases in AI algorithms.

In this article, I provide the holistic Personal Disruptive Innovation roadmap for cultivating creativity and critical thinking effectively.

Creativity and Critical Thinking Roadmap 

Personal Disruptive Innovation is the creativity, authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking roadmap that will help you unlock your creative potential by cultivating a solid growth, ethical and critical thinking mindset, creating new and unique opportunities, and disrupting your current target market. Personal disruptive innovation is a term that describes a holistic system for developing human intelligence, authenticity, empathy, integrity, and critical thinking. This concept is based on my latest book, “Eco-Design Thinking for Personal, Corporate, and Social Innovation.” This model involves five steps: 1. Personal Ambition, 2. Personal Brand, 3. Personal Innovation Strategy, 4. Implementation, and 5. Personal Integrity & Empathy. This model is illustrated below:

This model will help you develop visionary, imaginative, and empathetic thinking. Instead of thinking outside the box, you’ll think like there is no box. The key is to cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning to drive personal innovation, which can help you become more creative and resilient and sharpen your authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. Remember that without self-knowledge, personal innovation, a strong mindset, and personal integrity, you won’t be able to succeed as an empathetic and disruptive innovator. This system will unlock your creative potential and imagination while honing your authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. It will guide your beliefs and actions, helping you discover your purpose in life and leading to a more fulfilling, content, and healthier life, personally and professionally.

Personal disruptive innovation is a system that helps you explore and redesign your life, build resilience, and develop your personal brand. It enables you to define your higher calling and discover your life’s purpose. Elon Musk once said: “Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose only. That’s how you keep power and your peace. It worked pretty well for me this far”. Using the personal disruptive innovation model, you can become a visionary, imaginative, and empathetic individual. This involves using self-learning to translate your self-knowledge into personal innovation and to develop skills such as resilience, authenticity, integrity, strategic thinking, and critical thinking, which are crucial in the AI era. This system will also help unleash your creative potential and imagination and will help you skillfully analyze information from observation, experience, reflection, and reasoning.

Personal Ambition – Personal Purpose

Although the personal disruptive innovation model consists of 5 phases, I will only focus on phase 1 (Personal Ambition – Personal Purpose) in this article because the foundation of creativity and critical thinking lies in this phase. This initial step involves engaging in a reflective process that includes deep thinking, introspection, and self-reflection. The outcome of this phase will be the creation of your personal ambition or purpose statement. This statement comprises your mission, vision, and key roles. You can click this link to view my personal ambition/purpose statement. 

Having a higher purpose in life means you’re living your values and beliefs. Finding your higher purpose is discovering who you are, what you stand for, what matters to you, and what you can contribute to the world. When someone feels that his life lacks purpose, he may struggle to find motivation and direction. This can lead to a sense of detachment from his values and a lack of inspiration to enrich his life and those around him. Finding motivation and direction can be easier when you have a purpose in life. This will inspire you to become more effective, ethical, and fulfilled. Having a purpose in life will inspire you to discover ways to become more creative, imaginative, and innovative. Life is never richer, fuller, or more rewarding than moving faithfully and persistently toward a compelling purpose. Remember what Elon Musk said: “Don’t even attach yourself to a person, a place, a company, an organization, or a project. Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose only. That’s how you keep power and your peace. It worked pretty well for me this far”. 

Having a clear purpose is crucial to becoming a visionary. According to Elon Musk, the thing that drives him is vision. He said, “I think having an inspiring and appealing future is important. There must be reasons you get up in the morning and want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future?” Your personal ambition/purpose statement supports an innovative, creative, imaginative mindset. The figure below shows the framework for personal ambition/purpose. Ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly.

By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner self and find answers to these questions. Read “How Mindful Meditation Boosts Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.”

Self-knowledge, Self-awareness, Self-management, Self-learning

Through this process, you’ll cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning, which entails a journey toward personal disruptive innovation, as shown in this diagram:

The more you want to be innovative, the more you should develop self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the foundation of your higher purpose. Self-knowledge entails insight into your nature and abilities based on your personal mission, vision, and key roles. Self-awareness is the experience of your personality and the ability to tune in to your feelings, thoughts, and actions. Self-management entails the ability to control your behavior, thoughts, and emotions. Self-learning is the ability to gather, process, retain, and evaluate knowledge alone.

Traditional creativity approaches suck

The best ideas come when you are alone. Self-learning is the foundation of creativity and imagination. Traditional creativity approaches lack imagination because they neglect self-learning and, because of this, fail to address complex problems. They heavily rely on group meetings and, therefore, miss opportunities to develop innovative and imaginative ideas. Nikola Tesla developed many creative ideas while working alone for over thirty years. Similarly, Stephen Hawking made significant discoveries while confined to his wheelchair, and Isaac Newton famously discovered gravity while in social isolation. Remember Nikola Tesla’s statement: “Being alone is when ideas are born. This is the secret of innovation”.  Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living”.

Stanford’s traditional design thinking relies heavily on cozy collaborative meetings and what can be described as creativity theater, where the focus does not lead to sustainable creativity development. On the other hand, my eco-design thinking approach takes an inside-out approach to creativity, emphasizing the designer’s imagination and disruption. It encourages a more independent and innovative growth mindset. Please read my articles “The End of Design Thinking: Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Design Culture to Fix the World” and “10 Ways to Kill Creativity, Sustainability, and Innovation”.

Human consciousness

Spirituality can play a vital role in this creativity process. It provides the intuition needed to make tough decisions and develop a higher level of consciousness. Elon Musk once said, “We should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness to understand better what questions to ask. The only thing that makes sense It is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.” By focusing inwardly and reflecting on your actions through self-examination with breathing and silence exercises, you can gain insights about yourself and your life’s purpose. This is what Einstein wanted to know.

You will also find out why you were born. This process will help you learn more about yourself and discover the truth about your life’s purpose. As Thomas Huxley said, “Learn what is true to do what is right.” This process enables you to learn more and discover the truth about yourself. By formulating your personal ambition, you will initiate self-examination and prepare your mindset for critical thinking. As you become more conscious of yourself, gain more creativity, and become a critical thinker. The thinking process and mindset changes are meant to prepare you for action as a proactive, empathic, and ethical critical thinker. Based on insights acquired through this process, you will also become more self-assured and work smarter through self-learning and self-knowledge. You become more creative and innovative as you grow more conscious of yourself. The words of Galileo Galilei may also be recalled here—“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.”

By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner voice and find answers to the questions you seek. This requires tuning into the same wavelength as your spirit, which is closely linked to the concept of synchronicity. Synchronicity refers to meaningful coincidences or events that co-occur without apparent. It is the connection between the ‘inner world’ and the ‘outer world’; consciousness bridges these two dimensions. Synchronicity can manifest in many ways, and it is a phenomenon studied by psychologists such as Carl Gustav Jung and Nikola Tesla, who were also in sync with the universe. I also act like a receiver and tune in at the same frequency.

My article “Sustainable Innovation Fueled by Purpose-Driven Culture” explains the remaining four stages of the personal disruptive innovation model.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

To gain more knowledge about this subject, you may consider attending his Orlando-Tampa Live Events:

Building a Purpose-Driven and Design-Driven Culture in Tech Companies

Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI

Cultivating Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.

Human-Centered AI Governance.

How Sustainability and Generative AI Fuel Design Innovation.

We also offer the Certified Authentic AI Leadership Coaching program. This program is appropriate for AI leaders, managers, and professionals who wish to strengthen their ethical leadership and critical thinking skills, drive their purpose and human-centeredness, and coach others to realize the same.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., founded the Center of Excellence in Design-Driven, Human-Centered, and Purpose-Driven Innovation in Orlando. He is a Dutch-American visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most crucial tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm. “

   

Orlando, Florida |  tpsi@live.com |  Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116

Orlando–Tampa Event: Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Boeing Culture

Boeing lost its way and needs to rethink its very reason for existing. Innovations fail at Boeing due to a lack of anchoring innovations in a purpose-driven corporate culture. Purpose-driven companies are not only focused on profitability but mainly on making a positive impact on society. Their innovations are sustainable. This appears to be different at Boeing, read my article “How the Boeing 737 Max Incidents Could Have Been Avoided”.  

Keynote: Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Boeing Culture

Speaker: Renowned Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D. | Location: 133 Town Center Blvd, Clermont, Florida 34714, USA  | Target audience: Tech executives, innovation leaders, and design managers only | Prior registration required via tpsi@live.com | Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116 | Date/Time: To be determined 

Event content and topics to be discussed:

Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Boeing Culture of Sustainable Innovation

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

 “The one thing missing from the board of directors of Boeing is a holistic view on cultivating a purpose-driven culture of sustainable Innovation” — Hubert Rampersad

Boeing lost its way. Other companies should take heed; “It’s become clear that Boeing’s problems run far deeper. They expose decades of American corporate philosophy gone awry. Boeing is a quintessential example of America’s rotting business culture over the past 40 years” (Markets Insider). Boeing focused on pleasing Wall Street because that’s how American executives believe companies should operate. The people who are at the top are there for a reason, and it’s basically to maximize shareholder value. Simply changing CEOs or hiring more engineers won’t make Boeing’s problems go away. The company needs to rethink its very reason for existing and what it should provide to society as an enterprise. Lopez: “A good American company isn’t just a vehicle for financial returns; it is first and foremost an employer, a contributor to economic and/or technological innovation, and a source of US power. Whether the recent disasters shake Boeing out of its somnambulance remains unclear. It’s also questionable whether other major companies with a similar maximize-shareholder-value-at-all-costs ethos will learn from the mistakes. But it’s clear that what Boeing — and the entire American corporate body politic — needs is nothing short of a philosophical counterrevolution”. William McGee: “For decades Boeing was the pinnacle of American engineering. It was America’s crown jewel and one of the most important and impressive companies in the US”. In Boeing’s quarterly earnings, President and CEO Dave Calhoun (who was hired after the previous 737 Max disasters) promised more of a focus on quality and encouraged employees to speak up about issues on the factory floor. But the short-sighted Calhoun is putting out fires with his ad-hoc approach. He does not realize that he is only treating the symptoms of the problem and not addressing the root cause. The real root cause is a rotten corporate culture at Boeing which is focused on making shareholders happy instead of focusing on a purpose-driven culture.

Boeing’s trajectory has veered off course due to America’s deteriorating business culture, which prioritizes swift profits for shareholders over aircraft safety. This shift was initiated by Jack Welch approximately 40 years ago. The recent Boeing crisis lays bare years of flawed American corporate philosophy centered around shareholder interests. A significant portion of today’s corporate challenges can be traced back to the legacy of GE’s former chairman, Jack Welch, who was revered by CEOs worldwide. Interestingly, Boeing’s current Chairman, David Calhoun, once served as Welch’s deputy. Calhoun is focused on maximizing profits for his shareholders, just like many CEOs in corporate America. It’s probably no surprise that CEO pay increased by 1,322% from 1978 to 2020.

Lopez: “An entire generation of politicians and executives preached the doctrine of efficiency in the name of maximizing profits for shareholders, and we’ve seen the results: stagnant wages, massive inequality, legislators captured by industry lobbyists, and companies that coast on past innovation and financialization because it’s easier than investing in something new. As Boeing has been forced to reckon with the corporate culture it developed over the past 40 years, corporate America has been forced to face the long-term cost of its obsession with shareholder primacy and efficiency.” McGee: “Boeing is vital, but we don’t treat it like it’s vital. We treat it like a casino”.

Former CEO Jim McNerney systematically promoted non-technical people to executive positions, particularly on the board. Incredibly, the MAX was developed under him and the commercial unit CEO — neither of whom had a technical degree. Former CEO Dave Calhoun, who is also not an engineer, has followed the same path, promoting people with similar financial backgrounds (left brain bookkeepers). The whole board should be fired!

Innovations fail at Boeing due to a lack of anchoring innovations in a purpose-driven corporate culture. The best innovations align with the innovator’s and company’s purpose and generate mutual value for its stakeholders. When innovations resonate with the employee’s and organization’s higher purpose and benefit the company, its employees, and key constituents, they are more likely to succeed and become sustainable. Purpose-driven tech companies are not only focused on profitability but also on making a positive impact on society. Their innovations are sustainable.  ….READ FURTHER.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

To gain more knowledge about this subject, you may consider attending his other Orlando-Tampa Live Events:

Building a Purpose-Driven Design Culture in Tech Companies

Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI

Cultivating Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., founded the Center of Excellence in Design-Driven, Human-Centered, and Purpose-Driven Innovation in Orlando, Florida. He is a visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm.

   

Orlando, Florida |  tpsi@live.com |  Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116

About the speaker: https://bit.ly/2CQLIfS  

Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Boeing Culture of Sustainable Innovation

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

“The one thing missing from the board of directors of Boeing is a holistic view on cultivating a purpose-driven culture of sustainable Innovation” — Hubert Rampersad

Boeing lost its way. Other companies should take heed; “It’s become clear that Boeing’s problems run far deeper. They expose decades of American corporate philosophy gone awry. Boeing is a quintessential example of America’s rotting business culture over the past 40 years” (Markets Insider). Boeing focused on pleasing Wall Street because that’s how American executives believe companies should operate. The people who are at the top are there for a reason, and it’s basically to maximize shareholder value. Simply changing CEOs or hiring more engineers won’t make Boeing’s problems go away. The company needs to rethink its very reason for existing and what it should provide to society as an enterprise. Lopez: “A good American company isn’t just a vehicle for financial returns; it is first and foremost an employer, a contributor to economic and/or technological innovation, and a source of US power. Whether the recent disasters shake Boeing out of its somnambulance remains unclear. It’s also questionable whether other major companies with a similar maximize-shareholder-value-at-all-costs ethos will learn from the mistakes. But it’s clear that what Boeing — and the entire American corporate body politic — needs is nothing short of a philosophical counterrevolution”. William McGee: “For decades Boeing was the pinnacle of American engineering. It was America’s crown jewel and one of the most important and impressive companies in the US”. In Boeing’s quarterly earnings, President and CEO Dave Calhoun (who was hired after the previous 737 Max disasters) promised more of a focus on quality and encouraged employees to speak up about issues on the factory floor. But the short-sighted Calhoun is putting out fires with his ad-hoc approach. He does not realize that he is only treating the symptoms of the problem and not addressing the root cause. The real root cause is a rotten corporate culture at Boeing which is focused on making shareholders happy instead of focusing on a purpose-driven culture.

Boeing’s trajectory has veered off course due to America’s deteriorating business culture, which prioritizes swift profits for shareholders over aircraft safety. This shift was initiated by Jack Welch approximately 40 years ago. The recent Boeing crisis lays bare years of flawed American corporate philosophy centered around shareholder interests. A significant portion of today’s corporate challenges can be traced back to the legacy of GE’s former chairman, Jack Welch, who was revered by CEOs worldwide. Interestingly, Boeing’s current Chairman, David Calhoun, once served as Welch’s deputy. Calhoun is focused on maximizing profits for his shareholders, just like many CEOs in corporate America. It’s probably no surprise that CEO pay increased by 1,322% from 1978 to 2020.

Lopez: “An entire generation of politicians and executives preached the doctrine of efficiency in the name of maximizing profits for shareholders, and we’ve seen the results: stagnant wages, massive inequality, legislators captured by industry lobbyists, and companies that coast on past innovation and financialization because it’s easier than investing in something new. As Boeing has been forced to reckon with the corporate culture it developed over the past 40 years, corporate America has been forced to face the long-term cost of its obsession with shareholder primacy and efficiency.” McGee: “Boeing is vital, but we don’t treat it like it’s vital. We treat it like a casino”. 

Former CEO Jim McNerney systematically promoted non-technical people to executive positions, particularly on the board. Incredibly, the MAX was developed under him and the commercial unit CEO — neither of whom had a technical degree. Former CEO Dave Calhoun, who is also not an engineer, has followed the same path, promoting people with similar financial backgrounds (left brain bookkeepers). This diagram shows Boeing’s top 10 failures.

Innovations fail at Boeing due to a lack of anchoring innovations in a purpose-driven corporate culture. The best innovations align with the innovator’s and company’s purpose and generate mutual value for its stakeholders. When innovations resonate with the employee’s and organization’s higher purpose and benefit the company, its employees, and key constituents, they are more likely to succeed and become sustainable. Purpose-driven tech companies are not only focused on profitability but also on making a positive impact on society. Their innovations are sustainable. This appears to be different at Boeing, read my article “How the Boeing 737 Max Incidents Could Have Been Avoided”.

How to Fix It

In this article, I propose a holistic framework for building a purpose-driven culture at Boeing that fosters sustainable innovation. The framework includes several key elements, such as fostering authenticity, integrity, and a sense of purpose and empathy among leaders and employees, cultivating sustainable innovation, and integrating sustainability into the company’s business activities. By following this framework, Boeing can create a culture that benefits their bottom line and contributes to the greater good and leaders and employees in these companies will be genuine and true to themselves. All Boeing leaders and employees should follow the steps to cultivate their authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. This article is based on my experience as a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and Europe’s most valuable tech firm.

HOLISTIC MODEL FOR BUILDING A PURPOSE-DRIVEN CULTURE AT BOEING

Boeing should not only prioritize profits but also promote high values, high character, and critical thinking among their leaders and employees. This will help them impact our society’s well-being, integrity, and empathy in a positive way. In this article, I provide a holistic model to realize this sustainably, as shown in this diagram. This model is based on my latest book, “Eco-Design Thinking for Personal, Corporate, and Social Innovation.” It will aid Boeing to avoid any new problems by cultivating a purpose-driven culture. Read also “The End of Design Thinking: Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Design Culture to Fix the World”. 

This holistic, never-ending, purpose-driven cycle entails six stages:

1. Developing the personal purpose of leaders and employees at Boeing entails the foundation for cultivating their authenticity, integrity, empathy, emotional intelligence, critical thinking skills, and character. Personal purpose is associated with ethical and emotionally intelligent individuals with a sense of direction. This will help them to work smarter and love their job.
2. Formulating the personal innovation strategy of leaders and employees; this strategy entails a roadmap to translate their personal purpose into measurable actions.
3. Implement and cultivate their personal innovation strategy according to the Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge cycle to continuously improve and purposely manage themselves to become creative, innovative, smart, and empathic.
4. Aligning the personal purpose of leaders and employees with their behavior and actions to cultivate their personal integrity and empathy skills; Remember: “The higher your personal integrity, the better your attentiveness, the better your empathic skills, the fewer mistakes you make”– Hubert Rampersad
5. Developing the shared company purpose is about what Boeing stands for, its reason, and how it benefits society. Shared purpose entails Boeing’s soul and joint mission, vision, and core values.
6. Aligning the personal purpose with the shared company purpose. This creates uniformity of personal and Boeing values. Matching these two purposes is essential for achieving an ethical, cohesive, unified company and a happy, engaged, committed, and passionate workforce. It’s about aligning the objectives of leaders and employees with those of Boeing, as well as fostering mutual value addition.

Below, I will elaborate on each of these six stages.

Personal Purpose

Having a higher purpose in life means you’re living your values and beliefs. Finding your higher purpose is discovering who you are, what you stand for, what matters to you, and what you can contribute to the world. When someone feels that his life lacks purpose, he may struggle to find motivation and direction. This can lead to a sense of detachment from his values and a lack of inspiration to enrich his life and those around him. Finding motivation and direction can be easier when you have a purpose in life. This will inspire you to become more effective, ethical, and fulfilled. Having a purpose in life will inspire you to discover ways to become more creative, imaginative, and innovative. Life is never richer, fuller, or more rewarding than moving faithfully and persistently toward a compelling purpose. Remember what Elon Musk said: “Don’t even attach yourself to a person, a place, a company, an organization, or a project. Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose only. That’s how you keep power and your peace. It worked pretty well for me this far”.

Your personal purpose entails your identity (mission) and dream (vision). Your dream is related to a higher calling. Everyone has a higher calling, a so-called inner assignment. Personal mission is aimed at being, and personal vision is aimed at becoming. Your personal mission inspires you, and your personal vision motivates you. Your mission and vision statement (personal purpose statement) embodies your values. Your personal mission encompasses your philosophy of life and your overall objectives, indicating who you are, the reason for existence, why you are on earth, what your purpose here is, what you stand for, what values you are most committed to, what is decisive for your success, what is your life purpose, what do you live for, what are your core beliefs, what are your deepest aspirations, what makes you happy,  and what do you do that you are most proud of.  Your personal mission is your personal leading light, keeping you steadily in the course of your dream. “Who am I?” is an identity question. It initiates self-examination of your personal identity (the unique position you find yourself in) and a voyage of discovery. My mission is: “Enjoy the freedom to unleash the creative potential in others, especially if this can mean something in their life.”

Your personal vision statement is a description of how you want to realize your dream in the long term. It indicates where you are going, which values, beliefs, and principles guide you on your way, why you are involved in the design industry, what you want to achieve, what you desire for your life, what your long-term intentions are, what talents, skills and experiences you need to add value to your others, where you want to be at the end of your life, what you hope to become, where you would like your life to be headed, the ideal characteristics you want to possess, your perfect job situation, and what you desire to be. All Boeing leaders and employees should ask themselves these questions and answer them honestly.

By practicing breathing and silence exercises, you can better connect with your inner self and find answers to these questions. This will help you to discover your higher purpose. Please click on this link to view my personal purpose statement. It also entails my values and beliefs. Read further “How Mindful Meditation Boosts Critical Thinking in the Age of AI” and “Crafting Your Authentic Personal Brand: A 5-Step Guide“.

Through this process, you’ll cultivate self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-management, and self-learning, which entails a journey toward personal disruptive innovation, as shown in this diagram:

The best ideas come when you are alone.Self-learning – the ability to gather, process, retain, and evaluate knowledge alone — is the foundation of creativity and imagination. Traditional creativity approaches lack imagination because they neglect self-learning and, because of this, fail to address complex problems. They heavily rely on group meetings and, therefore, miss opportunities to develop innovative and imaginative ideas. Nikola Tesla developed many innovative ideas while working alone for over thirty years. Similarly, Stephen Hawking made significant discoveries while confined to his wheelchair, and Isaac Newton famously discovered gravity while in social isolation. Remember Nikola Tesla’s statement: “Being alone is when ideas are born. This is the secret of innovation”.  Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living”.

Personal Innovation Strategy

To bring your purpose alive, you must translate it into measurable actions. Boeing leaders and employees should formulate their personal innovation strategy to get their personal purpose to life. This is a roadmap to developing a growth mindset, authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. Without continuous improvement based on your personal innovation strategy, you won’t be successful in life and business. The following are the five steps to develop your personal innovation strategy:

Your personal innovation strategy helps you turn your personal purpose into manageable, measurable objectives and milestones in a balanced way. Using this strategy, you can effectively manage your time and become more disciplined, proactive, innovative, and empathetic. Please click on this link to view my personal innovation strategy. Suppose you want to learn more about this personal innovation strategy system. In that case, I recommend reading my article “How to Redesign Your Life Based on Your Personal Innovation Strategy”.

Implementation According to the PDAC Cycle

Once you have established your personal innovation strategy, it is essential to consistently implement, maintain, and cultivate it to effectively manage and challenge yourself in your personal and company life. To aid you in this process, I recommend following the PDAC cycle (Plan-Deploy-Act-Challenge), which is a continuous improvement cycle that will help implement your personal innovation strategy effectively, as illustrated in this diagram:

Implementing your personal innovation strategy through the PDAC cycle will lead to self-awareness, happiness, personal disruption, and enhanced authenticity, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking skills. It’s important to regularly update your personal innovation strategy and repeat the cycle to stay current with new challenges and lessons learned. These 50 tips will assist you in implementing your personal innovation strategy effectively.

Aligning Personal Purpose with Personal Behavior 

The next stage ensures harmony between your purpose and actions, aligning your deeds with your conscience. Our conscience is the inner voice that guides us to distinguish between right and wrong, fact and fiction. By listening to this voice, we can gain better insight into our empathic behavior, strengths, and weaknesses, ultimately impacting our solidarity with others. Albert Schweitzer once said: “The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity and empathy with other human beings.” This diagram illustrates this personal integrity concept.

To enhance empathy and personal integrity, aligning your personal purpose with your behavior is essential. This involves achieving more excellent compatibility between the two elements so that they are in harmony, as shown in the above diagram. When your personal purpose and behavior match, you can work authentically and purposefully without internal conflicts. This will lead to greater empathy, enhanced charisma, transparency, and trustworthiness.

Personal integrity and empathy

I advise Boeing leaders and employees to balance their personal purpose with their current behavior and actions to develop personal integrity and empathy. During this alignment process, they must reflect honestly on the following questions: What are my personal values, and how do they align with my actions? How can I ensure that my actions are consistent with my values? What are the potential consequences of my efforts toward others? How can I empathize with others and understand their perspectives? Am I staying true to my values and conscience in my actions? Are my thoughts and actions aligned consistently? How do my values and intentions relate to my current behavior? Is there congruity between my thoughts and my actions? Am I always acting according to my personal ambition and empathetic nature? Does my personal purpose reflect my desire to work with ethics and empathy? Are there any discrepancies between my personal purpose and my compassionate actions? Do I keep the promises I make to myself? How do others perceive me and my values? Do they see me as someone who stays true to my core beliefs and remains authentic to myself? They must also ask themselves: Have I always acted by my conscience? Have I always done what was right? Have I always worked morally? Have I performed compassionately regularly?

Shared Company Purpose

The shared company purpose statement differs from a personal one, but the fundamental principles remain the same. Boeing purpose entails the company mission, vision, and core values to inspire leaders and employees toward a common goal. The mission encompasses Boeing’s identity, while the vision is its long-term dream, based on several core values used to strengthen the single-mindedness of its people. The related questions are included in this below diagram:

Look at Boeing’s purpose statement:

Boeing mission statement is: “To connect, protect, explore, and inspire the world through aerospace innovation.” Boeing vision statement is “People working together as a global enterprise for aerospace industry leadership.” Boeing core values: “How We Operate; Start with engineering excellence; Be accountable; Apply Lean principles; Eliminate traveled work; Reward predictability and stability”.

Aligning Personal Purpose with Shared Company Purpose

Aligning personal purpose of Boeing leaders and employees with the shared Boeing purpose creates uniformity of personal and organizational values. Matching these two purposes involves reaching a higher compatibility between personal and company objectives and mutual value addition. To foster better ethics within Boeing and become a purpose-driven company, I encourage Boeing leaders and employees to formulate their personal purpose and reflect on aligning their personal purpose with the shared Boeing purpose, as shown in this Figure. This will help them to find their higher purpose and cultivate a good character.

Boeing leaders must communicate their personal purpose to their employees and coach them in this alignment process. By unifying the shared Boeing purpose with their personal purpose, you will create a strong foundation of peace, integrity, engagement, and learning upon which creativity, productivity, and growth can flourish, and life within Boeing will become a more harmonious and ethical culture. This will catalyze innovation by encouraging a learning culture of curiosity and exploration in the organization. This process is about getting the optimal fit and balance between these activities to enhance productivity, create a climate of trust, and cultivate a purpose-driven Boeing. This process is needed because leaders and employees at Boeing don’t work passionately, or expend energy on something they do not believe in or agree with. If there is an effective match between their interests and those of the company, and if their values and the institution’s values align, they will be actively engaged and motivated. This will create trust, and they will work with outstanding commitment and dedication toward realizing Boeing’s objectives. When their personal purpose is in harmony with the shared purpose (are compatible) and combined in the best interest of both parties, the results will be the good character of leaders and employees, restoration of their higher purpose, trust, engagement, collective sense of belonging, and cultivation of innovation and sustainability. In this way, they are stimulated to commit, act ethically, and focus on those activities that create value for Boeing.

Purpose Meeting

I recommend introducing a purpose meeting between Boeing leaders and their employees to build a sustainable higher-purpose culture. This meeting is a periodical, informal, voluntary, trusted, and confidential meeting of half an hour between the parties, aligning the personal purpose with the shared purpose as a topic. The purpose meeting also includes individual coaching. It is recommended to be held structurally at least once every two months. The leader plays a crucial role in this process. He/she should be an empathetic, trusted leader, coach, mentor, and role model. This approach fosters ethical awareness among Boeing leaders and employees, creating a purpose-driven company. When they see their efforts as part of a greater purpose, they will be more likely to invest their creativity, passion, and energy into their work and work smarter.

A study by Towers Perrin found that instead of matching the right employee to the correct position for long-term success, most US companies and human resource departments emphasize simply filling the job as quickly as possible and on corrupt DEI policies, read “Why DEI Sucks; How to Measure and Fix DEI“. As a result, American companies are losing money as fast as they lose employees. Getting the optimal fit between personal and shared purpose has become necessary to enhance workforce productivity and stimulate creativity, learning, engagement, commitment, and passion.

SUSTAINABLE INNOVATION

In today’s complex world, sustainable innovation is crucial. Traditional innovation approaches are inadequate because they lack a holistic approach. Instead, they are superficial, theatrical, and cozy. Technology companies should prioritize sustainable innovation as a fundamental capability to achieve sustainable growth and competitive advantage. Unfortunately, there are no real good examples of American tech companies focused on sustainable design innovation. Apple, Google, IBM, Samsung, Uber, Airbnb, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, OceanGate, Tesla, and SpaceX are not design-driven due to their poor design approach they learned at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. Read my article “Cultivating a Design-Driven Culture in Tech Companies“.

We must develop and implement innovative ideas better, faster, smarter, and sustainably. This is why I introduced the Eco-Innovation concept. Eco-Innovation involves integrating sustainability into the process of innovation. I identify three types of innovation that fall under this category:

• Personal innovation is unlocking your creative potential and creating new opportunities for yourself. By disrupting your current market, you can make a significant social impact. Personal Disruptive Innovation by Hubert Rampersad helps you find your higher purpose and improve your business and personal life for greater happiness and success. Combining personal disruptive innovation with corporate innovation and social innovation will help you generate more imaginative, innovative, empathetic, and disruptive ideas. “We need to understand that all knowledge starts with self-knowledge, all learning starts with self-learning, all innovation starts with self-innovation (personal innovation), real empathy starts with personal integrity, and without empathy, innovations are not sustainable ”- Hubert Rampersad
• Corporate innovation involves applying new ideas to create new products, processes, or services that increase the value of a company. Corporate innovation also encompasses Open Innovation by Chesbrough, Disruptive Innovation by Clayton Christensen, and BlockChain Innovation.
• Social innovation is developing and implementing new ideas and solutions that meet social needs and strengthen civil society. There is some overlap between social innovation and social entrepreneurship. Social innovation aims to improve the world by implementing innovative ideas that create social and environmental change, benefiting many people. Social entrepreneurs seek the most effective ways to achieve their social mission and provide social benefits.

The diagram below shows how personal, corporate, and social innovation are interconnected. Personal innovation is linked to self-learning, corporate innovation is linked to organizational learning, and social innovation is linked to community learning.

Traditional innovation approaches are unsuitable for a sustainable circular economy as they focus on process-driven, analytical thinking, cozy, theatrical meetings, and completing related tasks in a particular order using design tools. These approaches lack imagination and fail to address the larger picture. We must adopt a new design method better suited for sustainable innovation. I have therefore introduced eco-design thinking. This creative process involves empathizing with yourself, the end user, and the environment to generate innovative, imaginative, empathetic, and disruptive design ideas that are better aligned with social innovation. The new model is depicted in the figure below and consists of four stages: Explore, Ideate, Prototype, and Execute. It is an iterative, incremental, cyclic, and concentric process of exploring, ideating, prototyping, and executing (Rampersad, 2023). 

Eco-design thinking is a circular and iterative process that has no endpoint. The model consists of various stages that may form iterative loops and do not need to follow a specific sequence. Every iteration brings forth fresh insights. Eco-design thinking is a continuous and circular process that requires testing and refining your design while empathizing with yourself, the users, and the environment. Unfortunately, Boeing has ignored essential steps in this design model, with all the consequences that entails. Read “How the Boeing 737 Max Incidents Could Have Been Avoided”. Read also “How SDGs, ESG, and Purpose Fuel Design For Sustainability”.

The most important benefits of this new design model are: Before delving into corporate innovation issues, exploring and redesigning your own life to become innovative is essential, which leads to more empathetic, intelligent, and sustainable innovations that are in line with social innovation and the higher purpose of the company and its employees; A high level of personal integrity and a designer’s empathy is necessary to achieve superior design quality; By gradually building and enhancing the product and detecting defects early on, you can achieve better and more sustainable innovation outcomes.

Lopez: “Boeing can become better. The first step is believing that the state of Boeing is not a natural one — that it can be changed with conscious effort. We just have to choose a better way”.

These “10 Ways to Kill Creativity, Sustainability, and Innovation” apply to Boeing.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

Complimentary Initial Consultation to Enhance Your Design Process and Boost Design Team Performance

If you’re interested in gaining more knowledge about this program, you may want to consider joining our Orlando–Tampa Live Events:

Cultivating a Purpose-Driven Boeing Culture

Building a Purpose-Driven Design Culture in Tech Companies

How Sustainability and Generative AI Fuel Design Innovation

Cultivating Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., is a Dutch-American innovation expert who founded the Center of Excellence in Human-Centered and Purpose-Driven Innovation in Orlando. He is a visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm“.

Orlando, Florida |  tpsi@live.com |  Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116 

Orlando–Tampa Event: The Future of Industrial Design Innovation

The world has no shortage of complex problems that must be addressed. The design industry needs a radical new design approach that goes far beyond the original design thinking methodology. It needs a sustainable, purpose-driven design culture rather than relying on a theatrical and ad-hoc design process that involves cozy design meetings with sticky notes and fun design tools. Tech companies and design firms need a purpose-driven design culture that prioritizes profitability and aims to positively impact society.

Read: How the Boeing 737 Max Incidents Could Have Been Avoided 

and Top-10 Causes of Bad Designs 

Keynote: The Future of Industrial Design Innovation

Speaker:  Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.  

Location: 133 Town Center Blvd, Clermont, Florida 34714, USA 

Prior registration required via tpsi@live.com | Phone/WhatsApp: +13053992116 

Target audience: Tech executives, innovation leaders, and design managers only

Event content and topics to be discussed:

The End of The Design Thinking Era: The Future of Industrial Design Innovation

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

The era of design thinking has come to an end. Read the MIT Technology Review article “Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong? An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite” (2023).

Rebecca Ackermann (2023): “Founded in the 1990s, IDEO was instrumental in evangelizing the design thinking process throughout the ’00s and ’10s, alongside Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design or “d.school” (which IDEO’s founder David Kelley also cofounded). While the methodology’s focus on collaboration and research can be traced back to human-­factors engineering, a movement popular decades earlier, design thinking took hold of the collective imagination during the Obama years, a time when American culture was riding high on the potential of a bunch of smart people in a hope-filled room to bend history’s arc toward progress. Institutions like MIT and Harvard and boot camps like General Assembly established courses and degree programs, suggesting that teaching design thinking could be as lucrative as selling it to corporations and foundations. At the same time, consultancies like IDEO, Frog, Smart Design, and others were also promoting the idea that anyone (including the executives paying their fees) could be a designer by following the process. IDEO’s then-CEO, Tim Brown, used a savvy strategy for selling design thinking to the business world by stating that we can solve any problem if we empathize hard enough. But in recent years, the shine of design thinking has been wearing off. Critics have argued that its short-term focus on novel and naive ideas has resulted in unrealistic and ungrounded recommendations. Years in, “innovation theater”— checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts—had become endemic in corporate settings. At the same time, several social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects. Innovation agencies and educational institutions continue selling design thinking to individuals, corporations, and organizations today. In 2015, IDEO created its own “online school,” IDEO U, with a bank of design thinking courses. When Jake Knapp was running those design thinking workshops at Google, he saw that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn’t usually lead to built products or solutions. Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking”. Read the Fast Company article “Design giant Ideo cuts a third of the staff and closes offices as the era of design thinking ends.” 

Corporate America needs a purpose-driven design culture, not design thinking.

The world has no shortage of complex problems that must be addressed. Therefore, we need to evolve beyond design thinking. The design industry needs a radical new design approach that goes far beyond the original design thinking methodology. It needs a sustainable, purpose-driven design culture rather than relying on a theatrical and ad-hoc design process that involves cozy design meetings with sticky notes and fun design tools. With their outdated design approaches, American universities share some responsibility for the challenges tech companies like Boeing. Intriguingly, institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Harvard continue to adhere to the entrenched and outdated design thinking method that yields uninspired results and numerous design flaws; read “Things About Sustainability, Design Innovation, and Creativity You Don’t Learn at Universities.” To move forward, we must reimagine design with sustainability at its core. This means shifting our focus away from rigid design steps and tools and fostering a sustainable design culture. Tech companies, beyond shareholder value, must prioritize social responsibility. Boeing, for instance, should balance its focus on profits with a commitment to sustainable practices. In this article, I propose a new design approach that nurtures purpose-driven design cultures within tech organizations. It goes beyond the traditional design thinking that prioritizes sustainability and profitability and aims to positively impact society. The core of this new approach entails eco-design thinking.

Critical differences between eco-design thinking and design thinking: Where It All Went Wrong.

Let’s explore the eight critical differences between eco-design thinking and the failed outdated design thinking approach used by IDEO, Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), MIT, and Harvard:

1. Design thinking is, in theory, a non-linear and iterative process, but in practice, it is not. It has an endpoint, while eco-design thinking is a never-ending, non-linear, circular, iterative, incremental, cyclic, and concentric process of exploring, ideating, prototyping, and executing with no endpoint. Eco-design thinking never stops. It’s a continuous process of testing and refining your design while empathizing with yourself, the users, and the environment to generate innovative, imaginative, empathetic, and disruptive design ideas. Every iteration brings forth fresh insights. Through a gradual design, construction, and refinement process, along with early defect detection using iterative loops, you can achieve more efficient and improved design outcomes with eco-design thinking.
2. Eco-design thinking is holistic, while design thinking is not, causing bad designs. It starts with designing the designer’s life. Read my related article, “Top-10 Causes of Bad Designs”. Eco-design thinkers are holistic thinkers. They look at the bigger picture, not on just parts of the design problem.
3. Design thinking focuses on a process-driven, analytical thinking, cozy, theatrical design process and completing related tasks in a particular order using design tools. In contrast, eco-design thinking focuses on building a sustainable purpose-driven design culture. Design thinkers are left-brainers, while eco-design thinkers are intuitive, right brainers, with a growth open mindset. Their right brain and left brain are in balance.
4. Design thinking focuses entirely on the end-user, while eco-design thinking starts with the designer’s creative, imaginative, and empathic skills. How can we ensure end-user happiness when our designers lack intelligence, creativity, ethics, and happiness? Before you start designing products, you must first design yourself. In the eco-design process, the initial step involves the designer’s disruptive and imaginative skills. Before addressing the design challenge, one should introspect, examine, explore, and reinvent one’s own life using our personal disruptive innovation methodology. This self-awareness enhances understanding of both the designer and the design problem. By exploring and reshaping the designer’s life early in the eco-design thinking process, we pave the way for more disruptive imaginative designs, leveraging generative AI to create empathetic solutions.
5. Design thinking neglects personal integrity, while fostering a designer’s personal integrity and authenticity marks the beginning of eco-design thinking, influencing their genuine empathy. Genuine empathy starts with personal integrity. Eco-design thinkers are integer, genuine empathic, trustworthy, and consistent in their behavior. As a designer’s integrity grows, so does their attentiveness and empathy. Remember: “The higher your personal integrity, the better your attentiveness, the better your empathic skills, the better your design, and the happier your customer”– Hubert Rampersad. 
6. Eco-design thinking is a novel approach to design for sustainability and generative AI, while design thinking is not. Eco-design thinkers are an authentic personal brand. They make an emotional connection with the end-users. In the initial design phase of eco-design thinking, personal disruptive innovation encompasses developing novel ideas and establishing a robust, authentic personal brand for effective storytelling. This brand serves as a compelling narrative throughout the design journey. By leveraging generative AI and weaving captivating brand stories, designers can enhance their ability to gather more dependable user feedback. Read my article “Cultivating Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.”
7. Design thinking relies heavily on cozy collaborative meetings and what can be described as creativity theater, where the focus does not lead to sustainable creativity development. On the other hand, eco-design thinking takes an inside-out approach to creativity, emphasizing the designer’s imagination and disruption. It encourages a more independent and innovative growth mindset. Remember: The best ideas come when you are alone. Eco-design thinking diverges from traditional design thinking by eschewing reliance on cozy brainstorming. While the latter heavily depends on collaborative meetings to foster innovative ideas, research indicates that individuals working alone often exhibit greater creativity. Remarkable breakthroughs have emerged from the minds of solitary thinkers. For instance, Nikola Tesla conceived numerous groundbreaking ideas during his three decades of solitary work. Similarly, Stephen Hawking made significant discoveries despite being confined to his wheelchair, and the legendary Sir Isaac Newton famously unraveled the mysteries of gravity while in social isolation. Remember what Nikola Tesla said: “Being alone is when ideas are born. This is the secret of innovation”.  Albert Einstein said almost the same: “Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living”. Personal disruptive innovation is the secret. It creates an environment for the designer to wonder and be curious and imaginative.
8. Design thinking focuses on knowledge, while eco-design thinking focuses on  imagination. Eco-design thinking focuses on cultivating the imagination of the designer. Remember what Albert Einstein said: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. Logic will get you from A to B. But imagination will take you everywhere… When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I conclude that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking… The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Instead of relying solely on the theatrical design thinking approach, corporate America should shift its focus. What’s needed is a purpose-driven design culture in tech companies that prioritizes profitability and aims to positively impact society. Read “Things About Sustainability, Design Innovation, and Creativity You Don’t Learn at Universities”.

Purpose-Driven Design Culture

Technology companies should prioritize cultivating a purpose-driven design culture based on eco-design thinking as a fundamental capability to achieve sustainable growth and competitive advantage. These companies are not only focused on profitability but also on making a positive impact on society. They go beyond merely understanding what customers want and why they like it.  Unfortunately, no examples of purpose-driven tech companies with a design-driven culture exist in corporate America. Apple, Google, IBM, Samsung, Uber, Airbnb, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, OceanGate, Tesla, and SpaceX are not design-driven due to their poor design approach they learned from DEO, Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), MIT, and Harvard. Look what happened with Boeing due to the lack of a purpose-driven design culture.

Read: “Boeing lost its way. Other companies should take heed”; “It’s become clear that Boeing’s problems run far deeper. They expose decades of American corporate philosophy gone awry. Boeing is a quintessential example of America’s rotting business culture over the past 40 years” (Markets Insider). Boeing focused on pleasing Wall Street because that’s how American executives believe companies should operate. The people who are at the top are there for a reason, and it’s basically to maximize shareholder value. Changing CEOs or hiring more engineers won’t eliminate Boeing’s problems. The company needs to rethink its reason for existing and what it should provide to society as an enterprise.  ….READ FURTHER.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D.

To gain more knowledge about this subject, you may consider attending his other Orlando-Tampa Live Events:

Building a Purpose-Driven Design Culture in Tech Companies

Purpose-Driven and Human-Centered AI

Cultivating Authenticity, Integrity, Empathy, and Critical Thinking in the Age of AI.

Hubert Rampersad, Ph.D., founded the Center of Excellence in Design-Driven, Human-Centered, and Purpose-Driven Innovation in Orlando, Florida. He is a visionary leader in innovative solutions for genuine sustainability, disruptive design innovation, critical thinking in the age of AI, human-centered and purpose-driven AI, and entrepreneurial leadership. He holds a Ph.D. in Innovation Sciences, an MSc in Technology Engineering & Robotics, and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from leading accredited universities in the Netherlands (Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology). He is a well-known futurist, advocating for genuine sustainability on a global scale. With extensive knowledge and expertise, he has authored 25 books on the topics above in many languages and is highly regarded for his insights in these fields. One of his books, “Total Performance Scorecard,” has been published in 20 languages. Dorothy Leonard, an innovation professor at Harvard Business School, wrote the book’s foreword. Rampersad has also previously served as a guest lecturer at MIT Sloan and was featured in BusinessWeek. He was a senior design innovation coach at ASML, the most important tech company in the world and “Europe’s most valuable tech firm.

   

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