Related and unrelated Sunday reading on innovation in business, life and career:

• Valeria Maltoni, How do You Become an A-Player?

  A couple points: 1) Know that it’s all invented, 2) Stop measuring everything, 3) Be a contribution, 4) Work on improving your skills constantly, and 5) Think “can do” as a default.

  In short, being an “A-Player” isn’t about money, or “friends”, or “followers”; it’s not about anything that’s easy to count or measure; it’s not about trying to be an “A-Player” but simply being one.

• David duChemin, How I Got to The Why:
  

  Why drives how.

  … Whether I am seen to have succeeded or failed at any one endeavor is not the point. The point is that I had a chance to do it, to create, and in so-doing to fan my creativity to flame, to feed my soul, to stretch my mind, to make a difference and leave – I hope – the world a little better for my being here.

• Margart Talbot, The New Yorker, Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.:
  

  “More and more of our young people are using these drugs [neuroenhancers such as Adderall, Ritalin, Provigil, etc.] to help them work,” Farah said. “They’ve got their laptop, their iPhone, and their Adderall. This rising generation of workers and leaders may have a subtly different style of thinking and working, because they’re using these drugs or because they learned to work using these drugs, so that even if you take the drugs away they’ll still have a certain approach. I’m a little concerned that we could be raising a generation of very focused accountants.”

  (via Jason Kottke)

• James Gardner, Innovation Consultants:
  

  [An innovation consultant's] opportunity is to show these companies how to build scalable processes that can take a large number of incremental improvements, and move them through to completion at volume.

  … the same processes that work for incremental innovation also scale up to breakthrough and disruptive innovation as well. So from the perspective of the innovation consultant, showing a customer how to do incrementalism well leads, eventually, to them doing the kind of high visibility, big bang work they wanted to do in the first place.

• Ashlee Vance, Does H.P. Need a Dose of Anarchy?
  

  H.P. faces a fresh set of challenges as the second stage of Mr. Hurd’s tenure begins. Most pressing is widespread concern that Mr. Hurd has built an inflexible, solipsistic giant so obsessed with schematics and data-driven fiscal machinations that it has lost the ability to deliver that prized and perennial Silicon Valley trick: to surprise and astound.