People will have a perception of you and this will feed into their expectations of what you are able to do.

You can approach this from one of three ways:

1. Embrace their expectations – meet them at the point where they will get what they want
2. Change their expectations – inform them of what they might get if they shift a little
3. Defy their expectations – ignore what they want and plough your own furrow

Choose 1 and you’ll remain a shopkeeper, providing stuff that people have on their shopping list. If that’s your model, then embrace it but don’t expect to innovate on your terms. You’ll need to be create lots of different things but they’ll mostly be what you’ve done before – this is the Tex-Mex food approach (same ingredients; folded differently) which I’ve mentioned before.

Choose 2 and you’ll must be able to compromise and cooperate. Compromise means ceding ground from the weird and wonderful and accepting the fixed mindsets from some of the stakeholders. Cooperation means being able to remove blockers and finding a path of reasonable resistance. It’s OK to push back and you don’t have to give in to everything.

Choose 3 and you’ll be the innovator and exceptional, but with little business. Your great ideas will remain just that – ideas. If they’re outside the zone of stretch, they’re too unexpected for people. These ideas will fly only when you’ve found someone who will pick up the torch of the idea and move it forward. Seek the Trojan Mice who want to disrupt.

I’ve been all three of these; I AM all three of these. Which I am to you will depend on your perception of where I am and what I do.