Mental Nimbleness for Executive and How to Enhance It The more the business environment changes, the faster the value of what you know at any point in time diminishes. In this world, success hinges on the ability to participate in a growing array of knowledge flows in order to rapidly refresh your knowledge stocks. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lane Davison While new knowledge flows are important, they are not enough! A major challenge that confronts business leaders is seeing how change and innovation, external to their own organization, can lead to new possibilities to create and deliver value to customers. This requires business leaders to enhance their adaptive potential and their ability to make mindshifts. The illustration below is a New System of Engagement. Seeing new possibilities requires a mindshift–a new way of envisioning what is relevant and meaningful to customers.
Netflix, Zappos and Groupon are three great examples of companies who exploited the potential of technology and leveraged the growing number of customers online. Don’t Stifle Innovative Thinking. Entrepreneurs are by nature always thinking of innovation and the next great idea, but you may unwittingly have ways of thinking and processes that are holding you back. In their book “The Physics of Business Growth: Mindsets, System, and Processes,” Ed Hess and Jeanne Liedtka outline a few ways that even the most innovative company may be unknowingly sabotaging its own success. Those ways of thinking must be examined and changed if your startup or small business is going to reach its potential. Time-tested managerial goals like efficiency, scale, and low-variance operational excellence should be the first to go. The culture, behaviors, processes, measurements, rewards, and intolerance of failure needed to drive operational excellence are fundamentally different from those needed to foster innovation, which requires an emphasis on exploration and invention.
The need for certainty is another principle that can cripple an organization. Innovation doesn’t have to be revolutionary. Innovation Isn't About New Products, It's About Changing Behavior. Behavior is the unknowable variable in every innovation, and it is the variable that most determines the opportunity a new business model has to evolve and take advantage of the new behavior. It's The Behavior, Stupid We are at the tail end of an era that has focused almost entirely on the innovation of products and services, and we are at the beginning of a new era that focuses on the innovation of what I like to call "behavioral business models. " These models go beyond asking how we can make what we make better and cheaper, or asking how we can do what we do faster.
They are about asking why we do what we do to begin with. When Apple created iTunes it didn't just create a faster, cheaper, better digital format for music, it altered the very nature of the relationship between music and people. eBay did not just create a platform for auctions, it changed the way we look at the experience of shopping and how community plays a role in the experience. Cloud-based Dialogue. Psychology/Customer Experience / If customers don't "get it!" Business/ Changing World / Does it create or deliver value to customers? Think Differently: A Leadership Imperative for a Changing World Find Your Place in a Changing World
How Coping Strategies can Make Your Business Less Relevant When was the last time you took a fresh look at the value or relevance of your business to today’s marketplace? Did you take action? Businesses of all types, sizes and locations are impacted by shifting global business conditions, rapidly changing business models and innovation. These forces cause a shift in the context of business, what is meaningful and of value to customers. Slipping out of context happens unless one takes deliberate actions to adapt.
Innovation Is a Double-edged Sword Innovation is touted as the solution. Former GE CEO, Jack Welch once said, When the change on the outside is faster than the change on the inside – the end is near. Large-scale studies confirm what most business leaders feel that the volatility and growing complexity of the business climate undermine “business as usual.” The how is a challenge in both learning what to do differently and overcoming the resistance to change. Technology, especially information technology, is also a double-edged sword. Leadership in a Changing World. What makes a product innovative? 2012 Global CEO Study. Overview For some time, businesses have been refining and optimizing their networks of suppliers and partners.
But something just as meaningful has been happening – the sudden convergence of the digital, social and mobile spheres – connecting customers, employees and partners in new ways to organizations and to each other. In speaking face-to-face with 1,709 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders around the globe, leaders confirmed that our new connected era is changing how people engage.
How are CEOs responding to the complexity of increasingly interconnected organizations, markets, societies and governments? Empowering employees through values CEOs see greater organizational openness ahead. Videos: CEOs discuss their employee priorities Shared values driving key decisions CEO Murray Jordan of Foodstuffs, a New Zealand food cooperative, extolls the benefits of shared values for his company.
View this video (00:02:05) Tweet this video Bringing value and making a difference. CEOs Cite Innovation as a Key to Business Models -- and Even Our Energy Future. The social side of strategy - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Strategy in Practice. In 2009, Wikimedia launched a special wiki—one dedicated to the organization’s own strategy. Over the next two years, more than 1,000 volunteers generated some 900 proposals for the company’s future direction and then categorized, rationalized, and formed task forces to elaborate on them.
The result was a coherent strategic plan detailing a set of beliefs, priorities, and related commitments that together engendered among participants a deep sense of dedication to Wikimedia’s future. Through the launch of several special projects and the continued work of self-organizing teams dedicated to specific proposals, the vision laid out in the strategic plan is now unfolding. Wikimedia’s effort to crowdsource its strategy probably sounds like an outlier—after all, the company’s very existence rests on collaborative content creation. Our objective in this article isn’t to present a definitive road map for opening up the strategy process; it’s simply too early for one to exist. Closer to home. Ideas so fresh--they should be slapped!: From the Horse's Mouth: Why new products fail. Without a doubt, San Francisco is one of the most innovative places on earth.
But when I was there, I found myself irresistably drawn to a place that has actually shunned innovation for its premier product - and provided me with a fascinating lesson on how even the best innovation can fail. The Boudin Bakery, the bakery that makes the delicious sourdough on Fishermans' Wharf, has been using the same sourdough starter since it opened in 1849. In fact, keeping this original "mother dough" was so important that bakery owner Louise Boudin risked her life to save it during the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. I don't blame her. Their sourdough bread is incredible! I tried to eat my weight in it during the week I was in San Francisco. During my tour of their bakery though, I was intrigued by the description of the delivery cart in the picture above.
At first glance, this really took me aback! Imagine your sales attempt goes something like this: "Absolutely! " Wait! How? 10 Jobs That Didn't Exist 10 Years Ago. The "random collision" theory of innovation. This post originally appeared on the Fortune website. Leaders tend to surround themselves with people who are like them. Creating environments where "unusual suspects" can meet is the key to generating new business ideas. Collaborators are everywhere. You will find them in the gray areas between silos. It is human nature to surround ourselves with people who are exactly like us. It is easy to see the potential from enabling random collisions of unusual suspects. Social media is a hotspot for random collisions. The goal is to get better faster. We live and work in a networked world complete with mega bandwidth and social media platforms to help us collide with more unusual suspects if we just look up from our silos.
Business model innovators are all around us. This piece is adapted from The Business Model Innovation Factory. The #Innovation Insurgent Daily. Why Apple is Winning: Innovation, Opportunity and Execution. Apple is building one of the most stunning financial runs in the history of corporate America, as Tuesday’s blowout showing affirmed. The company says it’s sold over 365 million digital devices over the last five years — 50 million last quarter alone — and is currently averaging nearly $4 billion in monthly profit. It has amassed $110 billion in cash. Most insanely, this could just be the beginning: Apple is exceedingly well-positioned to take advantage of several major trends in the new digital economy. Thanks to a combination of anticipation and luck, Apple — which nearly went bankrupt before the last tech boom — is poised for even greater heights if it can continue to out-think, out-innovate and out-execute its competitors.
Here are three major forces buoying Apple’s growth and pushing the company forward. Opportunity: Three ongoing trends have created the environment for Apple to continue its ascent: Smartphones, tablets, and Asia. Strategy, Context, and the Decline of Sony - Sohrab Vossoughi. By Sohrab Vossoughi | 10:55 AM April 25, 2012 Sometimes it’s useful to be reminded that a great strategy is only great in context.
From the early 1980s and into the 90s, Sony’s was great. The unrivaled master of the consumer electronics world, its name was synonymous with cutting-edge technology, sophistication, and desirability. People had a collective vision back then of a thrilling yet humane future, and Sony’s hyper-capable, slightly fussy gadgets were its clearest expression. It was much more than just the Walkman and the Trinitron—everything the company made was of impeccable quality, satisfying to hold and intricately detailed in its functionality.
That last statement is still true today, but everything else has changed. Both observations are correct, but they only hint at the underlying question: why is the strategy that once served Sony so well now failing so badly? Part of the shift is technological. In the experience economy, these expectations are reversed. Continuous Improvement Is About Engaging Employees :: WNYmedia.net. Put Down the Smartphone and Pick Up a Pencil. Former IBM CIO Irving Wladawsky-Berger Says Complex Technology Creates Need For Better Design - The CIO Report. An IBM Global CEO Study conducted in 2010 concluded that complexity was the primary challenge emerging out of its conversations with 1,500 CEOs and senior government officials. “CEOs told us they operate in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex.
Many shared the view that incremental changes are no longer sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways.” These same CEOs cited creativity as the most important leadership quality they look for over the next five years. “CEOs now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics.
Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation. To connect with and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways.” Over the past several years, we have seen a rising emphasis on design, creativity and holistic thinking in business to help us deal with an increasingly volatile, unpredictable complex world. This is easier said than done. Disruptions: Innovations Like Instagram Are Tough for Large Companies. Leading in a Hyperconnected World. Three reasons to change how your organization communicates.
With the rise of new digital media platforms and social networks, people are absorbing information at a greater velocity and from a wider set of channels than ever before; they are also using that information in new ways. Anyone with an Internet connection or cell phone can share their ideas, influence public opinion, or even spark a movement for change. Yet while technology and the Internet have evolved rapidly over the last decade, our understanding of what it means to be a leader in this new, networked society has not kept pace. Leadership has become distributed and collaborative. The new reality is that leaders don’t lead alone. We are all part of a much broader problem-solving network, with many high-performing organizations and individuals—public and private—working on different parts of the same problem or even the same part of the same problem. Mine all stages of the “knowledge life cycle” Let go, decentralize. Compete on Know-Why, Not Know-How - Adam Richardson.
By Adam Richardson | 12:50 PM April 12, 2012 Do you know why you make the products or offer the services you do? Too often I find that companies don’t have a clear enough sense of why they do what they do. They get stuck making incremental improvements that are rooted in existing competencies, markets, and business models. This is especially problematic when companies decide to innovate. I call these types of insights core insights, a concept which I first introduced in my book, Innovation X. A case in point: The Prius has become such a strategic product that Toyota is in the process of turning it into a full sub-brand and a range of vehicles. But the success of the Prius wasn’t a slam dunk. So how do you sell a more expensive economy car, especially one with an unfamiliar, unproven technology? After the economy-focused first generation car proved the viability of the technology, Toyota had a core insight for the second generation car that cracked this conundrum. 1. 2. 3.
Most Chief Innovation Officers Are Just Window Dressing. Has Innovation Lost Its Meaning? Percolate's Noah Brier On Its True Definition. Noah Brier.jpg" border="0" alt="" width="188" height="282" />"For better or worse, the word 'innovation' has come to represent so much that it seems to have lost most of its meaning," says Noah Brier, cofounder of Percolate, a company that helps brands create content on a social scale. So a few years ago, Brier decided to read some of the early writings of Josef Schumpter, the first person to really talk about innovation in the field. "Reading his stuff really opened my eyes, as he had a very specific definition of innovation: The commercialization of an invention," says Brier. "In that way, he saw the act of innovation as totally separate from the act of invention, and in my interpretation, defined innovation as successfully finding a market for a new idea.
Innovation is part of a process that involves creating something new (invention), figuring out how to commercialize it (innovation) and then actually getting to adopt it (marketing). " FAST COMPANY: Tell me more about Percolate. Why Innovations Are Arguments. Too many executives confuse what an innovation is with what an innovation would do for them if they had one. The solution? Think of innovation as an if-then argument. Henry Ford’s argument for the Model T can be expressed as an if-then statement. Image courtesy of Ford Motor Company. Attend almost any conference on innovation, and one will hear someone in the audience ask, “Yes, but how are you defining ‘innovation’?” The problem is a serious one, not the least because companies send engineers, “technology entrepreneurs” and “technology scouts” in search of innovations when a shared understanding of what they are looking for may not exist across the organization’s people and functions or between “scouts” and managers.
I propose that all true innovations are arguments. Let me explain. Arguments can always be expressed as if-then statements: If we agree to a proposition being true, sound or valid, then we can infer a conclusion. Ron Johnson: Retail's new radical. 3 Ways To Predict What Consumers Want Before They Know It. What Would Thomas Edison Do? At GE, It's a Guiding Business Question - Business. A Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond. Ford-creates-first-silicon-valley. 1111 Lincoln Road. Paul4innovating's Blog | Building the Innovation DNA. Startup Radically Reinvents The Disposable Coffee Cup, Eliminating Plastic Lids | Co. Design. Kiira, The Ugandan Electric Car That Could. Sorry, Strivers - Talent Matters. Video: John Kao on the Global Innovation Agenda. Three Questions that Will Kill Innovation - Tony Golsby-Smith - The... How to Avoid the Innovation Death Spiral. Top 'Innovators' Rank Low in R&D Spending. Innovation: Corporate Culture is Not the Answer!
The World’s Most Innovative Companies. TEDxMaastricht - Tim Hurson - "The shock of the possible" Ten Red Flags for Innovation. John Hagel on "Invisible Innovation"