Change happens fast these days in the global information economy, even for small businesses.  Success these days means approaching your work with fresh eyes, eager to learn, earn and innovate every day. Here are a 7 ways  you can to do this at work

• Be a constant student of your environment, industry, community, customers and genuine interests. This means paying close attention,being aware and present. Determine specific priorities for your business and focusing on that.
• Be a life long learner and always work towards learning new things. Strive to improve your openness to new ideas.
• Trust your gut and believe in yourself enough set resources aside now to pursue opportunities you foresee.
• Get interdisciplinary, cross departments and encourage teams to communicate and collaborate together.
• Experiment, take risks, and most importantly, play. Play with what you’ve got. Accept the surroundings, obstacles, and circumstance as part of the canvas and paint away.Encourage innovation in the ranks by leading the way.
• Attempt to solve problems yourself and encourage others to adopt a “Can Do” attitude. Allow everyone to take on a designer mindset. Give them a part in dreaming up solutions.
• Focus on value adding activities not busy work. This requires having an objective and expected return in mind, as well as just saying no to mental masturbation of work for work’s sake.
• Design to enhance efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness. Design thinking scales to business of all sizes.
• Listen to diverse and divergent opinions. Think of the strange hybrid love child   between NPR, Fox News and the Daily Show. What would the equivalent be in your line of work?
• Make information available for others to succeed and build from your findings and experience. They may even improve or
• Emphasize and edify people who demonstrate the ability to add value to your life and work. 
• Use fluid roles and job titles that allow for flexibility.

– Listen. Create different personal and company wide listening policies.

Where can you listen to your customers? competitors?

When can you do it? How much time should you devote to it?

The answers to these questions will vary

It’s not about time, it’s about value. Focus on value. How can you drive something forward. What needs to be done to enhance the value of your work? Is it perception and marketing or the service/product itself?

If you believe, you grow from your mistakes, you will. If you believe

How well you bounce back from mistakes depends on your beliefs about learning and intelligence. When you believe that intelligence develops through effort and experience, mistakes are seen as opportunities to learn and improve. If you believe intelligence is fixed, you may fool yourself into believing that  mistakes demonstrate a lack of ability, not a lack of experience.

The opposite of adaptive- something that learns or grows, would be a conditioned system like a machine. Organizations built to run like machines are thus by their nature slower to adapt to market changes. Since markets in the information age change quickly, the ability to adapt to new situations has become increasingly important.  According to a study in the APS journal, Psychological Science,

What other skills help an adaptive mindset?

How to I cultivate one?