Look at the cloud. That's certainly a place I would look if I were trying to envision a future for an organization and understand changing market and business dynamics. The buzz about SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud computing has been increasing, with Steven Jobs' recent announcement of Apple's iCloud service just the latest entre' on the growing menu, The potential for cloud computing and SaaS to bring paradigm shifting opportunity and disruption was brought home at a Proformative seminar for CFO-types that I just attended. My mission as a general manager, strategist and marketer infiltrating this seminar was to gain a better understanding of how medium-sized and growing organizations can gain traction by employing newer financial tools.

Over the past few weeks I have encountered the topic of innovation at seemingly every juncture: At a symposium on facilitating group innovation. In a business school strategy group discussion of writings on the process of innovation and how to foster it in organizations. Through the work of a non-profit that provides STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education to kids to encourage invention. From an insightful trade association executive who spoke about the need for associations to launch innovation processes to assure their sustainability. From this immersion in innovation thinking, a big take away is that innovation starts with a person. It starts from a person being creative, open, curious and willing to entertain change.

In the social media tsunami, many of us are running hard to stay ahead of the wave. The overall volume of conversation is rising rapidly, as are the demands and opportunities to participate.Like any new paradigm, this one calls on us to learn new ways of thinking and behavior. For instance, how do we best mine the brevity of the 140-character Twitter post? What bit can we toss in as our blog entry that will not just be something that says "me too"? How do we find the time to check in on LinkedIn and Facebook and monitor Twitter while carrying on our analog lives and not offending those we need to interact with face-to-face? How can we best use all these platforms to carry our strategic business messages and not just banal observations? How do we seamlessly weave them into our work lives to increase our scope and power as professionals?