It’s great to see old friends doing well, isn’t it? When Chris Hyams set out to shake things up in Austin in the 1990s, he was starting up a bunch of new businesses. Now he’s Senior President of Product and International at Indeed.com. Yeah. THAT Indeed.com.

Reminiscing with Chris, he told us about the treasure map that led to his latest success and what he experienced along the way. As expected with any entrepreneur’s journey, there were bumps in the road and a few “learning experiences,” a.k.a. “flops.” But in skinning his knees, he learned some important lessons.

When asked what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, Chris’ response was intriguing. He said you had to be one part Don Quixote and one part Mr. Spock. Even if the only thing you know about the character of Don Quixote is that he was the deluded knight who tilted at windmills imagining they were giants, you’ve got the idea. Chris proposes that there are some days you have to wake up believing everyone else is wrong about how to run your type of business. You have to see your world in a skewed way and examine how you contribute to it in a positive, almost heroic way.

On the other hand, there are some days when you have to approach your business as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock: in a completely dispassionate, unemotional and logical manner. “Is this working? What isn’t working? Is this the best way to go about solving this problem?” Extra points for raising an eyebrow and using the word, “Fascinating.” Allow the big picture of Don Quixote’s “Impossible Dream” to balance with the tight focus of Science Officer Spock.

Lastly, a huge part of Indeed.com’s success is their innovation model. Their employees regularly come forward with new ideas for the company, new features, and business models. In fact, there was one that was presented called “Jobspotter.” It was an app that allowed the general public to take photos of Help Wanted signs, post them in the app and get rewarded by Indeed.com.

Chris didn’t care for it. He said it would never work. The other upper-management types agreed. The group that brought it in thanked them for their input—and they went ahead and proved them wrong, developing the app on their own time. Delightfully surprised and willing to admit his mistake, Chris said the lesson there was that “the greatest threat to innovation is certainty.”

Let that sink in right there: “The greatest threat to innovation is certainty.” How often have you allowed your certainty of the way things should be done get in the way of other ways they CAN be done? Are you allowing your team members to step up and give you a Mr. Spock point of view from the trenches? Are your dreams just impossible enough to inspire? You never know what you may learn tilting at windmills, boldly going where no one has gone before.

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