Melissa Dinwiddie

Click to watch (17:32) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! I used to lie to my piano teacher. Not about anything dramatic. Just about practice. I remember one particular week with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata — I'd barely touched the piano in seven days, and it showed the second I sat down. Fumbling through the same four measures. Losing the thread. That tight, sinking feeling in my stomach as my teacher waited. Desperate for an excuse, I told her I didn't like the...

Click to watch (08:46) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Last week I wrote about why routines go stale — the "Binder Problem,” if you caught that one. New initiative, new binder, all potential. Then autopilot sets in and nobody notices the wear until it's falling apart. That's a real problem. But it's not the only reason 90-day pushes lose steam. There's a second failure mode, and it shows up right around the same time — week 9, 10, 11 — for a completely different...

Click to watch (12:40) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Quick heads-up before we get into it: this week's newsletter looks a little different. I'm heads-down building something I'm excited about, so instead of the usual full article, you're getting show notes for this week's video — plus a peek at what I'm building. The Podcast Is Coming Here's the news: I've been producing weekly videos for a while now. Soon, I'll be turning those into a full podcast — audio and...

Click to watch (10:30) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Not long ago, I got on a call with a VP at a SaaS company. He hadn't reached out about a keynote. He'd reached out because his CEO had handed him a job with no map attached: make this company more innovative. The CEO wasn't wrong to want it. She's a natural innovator herself — the kind of leader who sees a problem and instinctively starts experimenting with it. And like a lot of natural innovators, she had a...

Click to watch (10:16) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! The Mandate Lands on a Tuesday Nobody hands you an innovation mandate with a start date that makes sense. It lands mid-quarter, in a meeting that was supposed to be about something else, usually as a single sentence: "We need your team to be more innovative." Then everyone moves on to the next agenda item, and you're left holding it. No budget line. No template. No week one. There's a predictable mistake that...

Click to watch (11:05) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! A year ago, I got a call from the then-president of the PMI San Francisco Bay Area Chapter. She wasn't calling about a keynote. She was calling because she'd been searching for a LEGO® Serious Play® facilitator, and my name had come up. Her chapter's Professional Development Day usually followed a familiar shape: keynote, breakouts, networking, a panel, a closing keynote. This year, she wanted to open the day...

Click to watch (09:27) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! For about fifteen years, I made my living as a professional calligrapher and ketubah artist — for the first half of that time specialized in hand-illuminating hand-illuminating Jewish marriage contracts for couples who wanted something one-of-a-kind. Every one of those projects came with a hard deadline. The wedding date doesn't move because the artist is "still finding the right concept." One couple wanted a...

Click to watch (08:41) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Loud Enough for Earplugs I just spent four days in Austin at my third Influence — the National Speakers Association's annual conference. Eight hundred speakers in one hotel. An introvert's nightmare, honestly. The noise in the grand ballroom got so loud from overlapping conversations that I pulled out the concert earplugs I keep in my handbag for loud music venues — just so I could hear myself talk at my own...

Click to watch (08:41) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Loud Enough for Earplugs I just spent four days in Austin at my third Influence — the National Speakers Association's annual conference. Eight hundred speakers in one hotel. An introvert's nightmare, honestly. The noise in the grand ballroom got so loud from overlapping conversations that I pulled out the concert earplugs I keep in my handbag for loud music venues — just so I could hear myself talk at my own...