There isn’t much poetry around in the innovation world is there?

So here’s my take on Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem ‘If’ from the 19th Century

💡 IF – (you want a job in innovation)

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you (because you’ve been in post 6 months and still not raised a million pounds),

If you can trust yourself when all those senior men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by sign-off delays,

Or being a dumping ground, don’t deal in projects with no home,

Or being hated: ‘What do they even do anyway?’ Don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream up the next idea to raise millions—and make these dreams your master;

If you can think, ‘but if only they’d just let me work outside of business-as-usual parameters’—and not make thoughts your aim as you’re told to submit a brief to Data like everyone else;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, time, and time, and time again (the Disaster fella I mean anyway),

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken, when you stood up in front of the organisation and said you’ll plug their income gap with something new next month,

Twisted by knaves to make a trap of governance and bottle necks for fools,

Or watch the ideas you gave your life and heart and soul to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with limited resources while justifying your job:

If you can make a heap of all your potentially winning ideas

And risk your job, over and over, on launching something new

And fuck it up, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word of loss and disappointment as your best ideas are shot down.

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew. And influence (read: beg) Creative

To serve you, long after they should have commuted home, and the bad ideas from trustees are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can test 300 ideas a month with no budget

And give finance made up numbers for products that neither exist nor have any provable benchmarks

If neither competitors nor work acquaintances can hurt you,

If all women and men count the failures with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving year

With ten years worth of work

Yours is the folder of legacy ideas that failed in the past, and every learning that comes with it,

And which is more—you’ll get the Charity Fundraising Innovation job my son!

Apologies Rudyard, but of all people, you will hopefully make allowance.