It’s raining nearly everywhere on earth. When people ask, “what is the greatest impact on business cultures today?” The answer is pouring innovation. Streams confluent into rivers, rivers run into lakes and oceans. Ideas rise into the atmosphere in Asia and fall again into new tributaries in America and Europe.

About 200 years ago, many founding fathers of the USA believed the world was designed by clockmaker, who set in motion all life and the planets. For people of the age, almost nothing had changed since the beginning of time. Newtonian physics explained and exemplified the regularity and symmetry of our clock-world.

In Thomas Jefferson’s time, a wealthy person could collect all the know books in a personal library. In 1815, Jefferson sold his 6,487 books, the largest collection in the nation, to the Library of Congress.

In 1899, the commissioner of the United States Patent Office, a Mr. Charles Duell, said, “ Everything that can be invented – has already been invented."

Today the Library of Congress contains over 13 million books, 100 million items, and is staffed by 5,000 employees. Since the patent office opened in 1790, it has registered more than 6.7 million patents. The backlog of patents is 500,000 and growing at almost 100,000 per year.

Now we know that we live in a universe of celestial chaos with the big bang, gravity warping time and space, star incubators, and black holes.  A comet may destroy life as we know it; the continents are moving beneath our feet, and space went from 3, to 6, to 10 dimensions?

In June of 1993, there were 130 websites and less than 3 million users. The Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. TV took 13 years to reach 50 million viewers. The Internet took 4 years to reach 50 million users. Today there are over 1 billion users. A University of California at Berkeley study showed that, in 2002, 532,897 terabytes of new data flowed across the Internet, 440,606 terabytes of email was sent, and the Web contained 167 terabytes of data that was accessible to all users, plus another 91,850 terabytes in the deep Web where access is controlled. There are currently about 2.9 million active web blogs containing about 61 GB of information. About 31 billion emails are sent daily, a figure which is expected to double by the end of 2006.

Yes indeed it’s raining ideas 24 by 7, faster and harder every day. The rate of innovation puts pressure on organizations in two ways. First, businesses must invent value for customers as fast as or faster than competitors. Second, businesses must absorb inventions internally from the wave of ideas crashing their doors or else operations will become flooded with inefficiencies (relatively).

Processes and systems must become more flexible and adaptable. People must become more creative and everyone, not just R&D, must invent. Running swift and effective change initiatives becomes just as important as running the business operations. Teams must form quickly using geographically dispersed employees and contractors. Precision and speed become the focus of training and knowledge transfer.

In this turgid world, creating extraordinary cultures, by communicating compelling visions and supporting collaboration, creativity, and adaptability, becomes a rising tide of success.

We will become  a planet of rain dancers.

Keywords: Change agent, innovation, business culture, competitive advantage, change leadership

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Michael Cushman, The Engaging Guru, wants you to master enrolling others in your truth, get the goodies of life, and change the world.  www.engagingchange.com