The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.

The irony, of course, is that large organizations are open. Employees interact with thousands or millions of customers each day. Executives and managers talk constantly with suppliers, consultants, regulators, and other stakeholders. Why, then, hasn’t open innovation made a bigger difference? Why isn’t the typical corporation as resilient and innovative as a city or a university? Because, to put it bluntly, they’re often run by people whose minds are hermetically sealed against unconventional ideas.

Habit #3: Repurpose Skills and Assets

An open mind means rethinking the identity of your organization. You’re probably used to defining your business by what it makes or sells, but to see new opportunities, you have to look deeper. You need to ask, “What are the skills, or ‘core competencies,’ that underpin our success?” And then, “How might we use those skills to create new products and services?

But the mindset of the West threatens to reduce our ability to truly benefit from this integration. We want a quick fix with demonstrable results. We want to see changes in our

brains. We want the experts to show us what to do and even, if we are lucky, to do it for us. In its absorption by the wellness movement, meditation threatens to become more like cosmetic dermatology than the ongoing self-examination that is its own kind of higher education.

We like to think that we can leap directly from a desire for change to a single insight or decision that will complete our reinvention. As a result, we remain naive about the long, essential testing period when our actions transform (or fail to transform) fuzzy, undefined possibilities into concrete choices we can evaluate.