Most great ideas are old ideas looked at through new eyes or re-purposed in powerful ways.

By Steve Moran

A lot of people approach Twitter with either a “gag me with a spoon” or “I don’t get it” attitude. I get that and was in that same camp for a long long time. I mean I am never going to follow Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Donald Trump or Barak Obama.  

And yet, I have become a fan. We frequently tweet things for our followers’ benefit. Articles we publish and other things we think would be of interest, yet will never get turned into an article. We have 1,750 followers — not a lot, but better than nothing — and if you would like to follow us you can at @seniorforum.  

My best use is that I follow about 130 people and/or organizations that publish interesting, thoughtful or provocative content. It serves as kind of an on-going digest of great leadership content — allowing me to scan through hundreds of options in maybe 5 or 10 minutes, flagging ones I want to explore further.

A Prime Example

I recently stumbled across an article author Dan Pink tweeted. The story title is “A focus on writing in every class is key to success in this rural California district“. Since you are already scratching your head wondering what this has to do with senior living, I want to start by saying there are almost no truly original, never thought of, never heard of ideas.  

Most great ideas are old ideas looked at through new eyes or re-purposed in powerful ways. Furthermore, while senior living has some of the brightest most amazing minds in the world, there are great minds and great thinkers in other industries. By spending some time listening to what they are doing and thinking, we get a lot smarter and make our industry a lot better.

One Person, One School, One Group of Students

After I read the article Dan tweeted, I realized that there were three important lessons:

  1. One person decided to change up his kingdom for the better. He decided that just because everyone else thought it was impossible to make it better or fix it, did not mean that was true.  

  2. Just one little thing . . . with an unwavering commitment to that thing resulted in a massive change in the whole organization.

  3. That first little thing leads to other little things (and some bigger things) that continue to change the world.

It could be, should be and in some cases today already is . . .

One Person, One Senior Community, One Group of Residents, One Group of Team Members

It is within the capacity of each one of us as leaders to be like that principal and many of you who are readers are already doing this. Imagine what it would be like if every executive director, regional manager, CEO, COO caught the vision.