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How to Be Awesome at Your Job · 2025-08-13 · 39 min · 7,590 words

1084: How to Navigate Change and Encourage Innovation with Jeff DeGraff

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The main reason people don't change is they're stuck in the planning cycle. The meeting about the meeting, the report about the report. They're gathering, gathering, gathering, gathering data, they're getting no real feedback from the world. So what you do is you hedge.

Stop trying to figure everything out yourself. Start calling other people. Start bringing other people in have different ideas than you do. That's Jeff DeGraff. He's a top academic speaker, professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, and founder of the Innovatrium Institute of Innovation.

His clients and colleagues have dubbed him the Dean of Innovation. His new book, The Art of Change, Transforming Paradoxes into Breakthroughs, shares how true innovation and change comes. from embracing contradictions. So you'll learn one, why facts don't actually change minds and what does, two, why you should seek out constructive conflict. And three, what to do when you're overwhelmed with choice.

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