In today’s world, where anyone can profess to be anything, words like “innovative” and “revolutionary” are second only to “best” and “leading provider” when it comes to those that are overused and misused in describing training courses and training providers.
But the reality is that imitation is not innovative, and regardless of how many times someone proclaims it, or how many different ways they try to say it, imitation is not leadership. This is simply because:
Imitators lack the creativity needed to find a better, more effective way of doing something…anything. Leaders are continually examining what they do and how they do it in order to find better, more effective ways to do it.
Imitators are always one, two…or five…steps behind those who actually lead. That’s because they have to wait for Leaders to develop the next innovative approach or methodology, and then scramble to copy it, while those Leaders whom they choose to imitate are already focused on the next innovation
Imitators can tell you what they do, but they can’t tell you why they do something in a particular way, because they live in the shadow cast by Leaders, who are driven to answer the question “why?”.
One of the facts that the entire team at Tony Scotti’s Vehicle Dynamics Institute (VDI) is proud of is that their peers, contemporaries and, most importantly, their clients, recognize – in much the same fashion that they recognized VDI’s predecessor, the Scotti School of Defensive Driving – VDI as an innovator in their field.
And that recognition comes not from what VDI says, but what VDI does. A timely case-in-point being VDI’s integration of the technologically advanced Automated Traffic Scenario Simulator system into their world renown driver training courses. Utilizing highly customized programming developed over the course of several months exclusively for VDI, this system replaces the often imitated, remote-controlled analog light system that was designed and developed nearly 15 years ago by VDI (which itself was based on a hard-wired system developed by Tony Scotti in the early 1980’s).
The ATSS system, the development of which VDI has been following closely and has been intimately familiar with for several years, provides the VDI team unprecedented accuracy in dictating a drivers reaction time, measuring their performance, and the flexibility to create even more complex, scenario-based exercises which more closely replicate the types of behind-the-wheel emergencies (and the attendant decision-making processes) their students are likely to face.
This is what innovation is, and this is what innovators do.
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