July 29, 2011

On Innovation, Research and Development, and Passion

I just held a fairly brief and concise staff meeting that could only be described as a pep talk on Innovation. Over the years I have learned that you can't repeat enough times the core mission of your organization to your staff, to your customers, to prospects, to partners, and to the public. We all get lost in the daily tactical work that we do such that we sometimes forget the touchstone of our reason for living, which is to create that which never existed before.

I realized at a pretty young age that I wasn't going to be satisfied with mediocrity. While I wouldn't say I have been the greatest technologist, or boss, or father, or husband, or age group triathlete, or pianist, one thing I can say is that I try my best in these each and every day. Each day I get up I am excited by the possibilities of becoming better at what I do, at reaching higher heights in achievement. I have a passion for living - always had, and I hope that I always will.

That lifestyle isn't for everyone. However, what I can say about my singular vision for DPCI since the first day I opened the doors here on April 27th, 1999 was to create a center of excellence for innovation with content technologies like no one had done before.

The goal for me with DPCI was simple: To help customers 'Reach their Audience, Anywhere.' I felt then as I do today that content could be created, enriched, and managed in such a way that organizations could publish (or deliver) it to any channel, be it print, Web, mobile, fax (back in the day), tablet (in modern times) and so forth.

In my first 'big' job out of college I worked at the New York Times. I was at an all-company meeting where the then-CEO, Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger quipped "someday people will be reading our newspaper by turning a knob on their eyeglasses and scrolling down the page." People laughed. I thought, why not?

My whole career has been about content technologies, and the culmination of my vision for this is in the admittedly clumsily named company I founded, DPCI.

Fast forwarding to today's meeting, more than 21 years after I heard The Elder Sulzberger speak. I spoke to my staff about the need for urgency, immediacy, and passion in their efforts to innovate. I spoke about how each of them - myself included -- is responsible for our own innovations and ingenuity. Certainly we can walk over to our colleagues at any time and collaborate, but what kind of an exciting world could we all live in if every one of us focused on innovation whenever we have the chance? Look at what Google has done and continues to do? Can we not strive toward the same goals and achieve similar ends? Absolutely!

The hallmark of DPCI is innovation in content technology. Our customers are always early adopters because they too believe, in their hearts, that it is through innovation that we create great growth and opportunity.

And so I ask anyone who reads my blog - and I'm not sure how many or few of you there are out there since I don't get a whole lot of comments down below these posts - what have you done today to innovate, and in so doing create great value for us all?

Posted at 02:59 pm by Joseph Bachana

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