Achieving success with a growth mindset

What qualities make people or organizations successful?  What is it that allows folks to move around, above, and even through obstacles and setbacks?
Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, came up with a theory about “growth mindset.” You might have heard of this term since many schools and colleges across America have incorporated it into their curriculums.
Let’s start with what kind of thinking is not growth mindset.  Dweck says that seeing challenge as negative, giving up without trying, avoiding negative feedback and resenting the accomplishments of others are all ways to do yourself in.
You can see that it is easy to see what growth mindset is—looking for challenges, persevering through obstacles (or “grit”), embracing effort, learning from criticism, appreciating the success of others and using them as role models—but that doesn’t mean it is easy to do.
The growth mindset, however, is not afraid of risk and hard work.
New start-up companies demand growth mindset thinking as they innovate.  They solve problems, help you through obstacles and challenges, and provide scalable and realistic methods of getting you to your definition of success.
Or, let’s say a CIO is hired to modernize old systems and eliminate stagnant ways of doing business. He or she is faced with the daunting legacy of “This is how we’ve always done it.”
Microservices can add on and expand a business without having to throw everything out and start over.  This allows that CIO to eliminate the trauma of a complete corporate culture/IT overhaul and instead add core capabilities that make daily processes easier, faster and more reliable.
At OWIT Global, we launched our start-up with Dweck’s theory of growth mindset as an integral part of our corporate culture, and we work to fold in innovation, effort, and learning from feedback and models into every new microservice we develop and continue to refine.
Those who use our microservices will exhibit growth mindset by looking for cool new ways to add on and re-architecture their existing systems.  They want to mitigate obstacles that slow down processes and growth without the expense of re-training and retro-fitting that comes with starting from the ground up.
Growth mindset.  Don’t we need this type of thinking for the challenges of doing business in an ever-challenging world?