Why I have demoted myself

When you start a company, you generally don't start it because you want to become a manager. You typically start it because you have a vision, or can see a gap in the market, or want to increase the impact of your ideas.

I’ve been leading Inventium since I started it on my own back in 2007. For the last two years, I’ve been itching to stop dividing my time between maker and manager time, and have been desperately wanting to be a full-time maker again. Being a maker is where I feel most energised and can be of higher value to our clients. 

So I am very excited to announce that Michelle Le Poidevin, who has been with Inventium for almost six years (doing pretty much every role that exists in the business) will be stepping into the CEO role. Mish has been my right hand for the last few years and I don’t think I have made a single major decision without getting Mish’s input first. 

As I said to the team at Inventium when I announced this news internally, Mish’s biggest strength is in her ability to prioritise learning and to learn incredibly fast. She recently completed her MBA (specialising in technology and innovation) from UNSW (on top of working full-time at Inventium), is one of the only people I know who reads as many books as I do per year, and has what I have found to be a very unique ability to be able to take a big picture view on things but then zoom in on the details and get sh*t done. Plus, she is also a bloody awesome human being.

You can reach Mish at [email protected] if you would like to say hi and/or congrats!

And as for my new role at Inventium, I’ll now be spending all of my time on developing and designing new ways that we can improve our clients' working lives.

My big focus right now is on Inventium's Workday Reinvention program, which in our first beta testing group of 50+ lawyers, generated big uplifts in not just productivity, but also in job satisfaction, energy levels and wellbeing. (BTW - If you are keen to chat about reinventing your workday (and that of your organisation) get in touch at [email protected]).

I’ll also still be doing lots of keynote speaking, writing, and hosting the How I Work podcast.

And of course, the team at Inventium will still be helping companies all over the world become better innovators.

Exciting times ahead :)

Dr Amantha Imber is the Founder of Inventium, Australia’s leading innovation consultancy and the host of How I Work, a podcast about the habits and rituals of the world’s most successful innovators.