Are We Cool Enough?

This question was prompted by this article on "What Motivates Your Top IT Employees". I posted the question to my management team, and ended up with a somewhat livelier discussion than I expected. I do push the team to do cool new stuff, and it often frustrates a good part of the team. While we are not done with this discussion, I have come to some conclusions:

• Cool for the sake of cool is silly. it still needs to enable the business
• What is cool today is status quo tomorrow (or maybe the next day). That doesn't mean it is not good, cutting edge stuff, and something to be proud of, but it does not give you a pass on cool new stuff
• I truly believe that thought leadership can be found anywhere; all levels of the business, customers, partners, etc. In order for us to capitalize on it, people need to bring their ideas forward. Encouraging this has proven to be a challenge
• We are in a major technology shift, specifically the shift of many business functions from traditional on-prem applications to the cloud
• This shift is causing considerable stress on the team, and managing through this change is another big challenge
• Many folks feel they are too busy to spend time finding cool new stuff. I am not completely buying it I find cool new stuff, and I am a pretty busy guy
• In order to give folks some more time to find the clever new solutions, I am trying to pick things we can stop doing. I am shocked at how hard it is to get people to tell me where they spend their time so I can pick stuff we will stop doing, or figure out how to do them more efficiently. If folks really do want to work on the cool stuff, they need to tell me what uncool stuff they spend time on so I can fix it

Of course we are pretty cool. We use our IT technology to enable the business considerably better than most companies I have contact with. Being an IT vendor ourselves, we also spend considerable time showing customers how we leverage our technology, and also upgrade to the latest beta (and sometimes alpha) versions to better support product development.