As a leader, encouraging your employees to innovate isn’t just a nice thing to do for them. It also delivers tangible value for your business. But what exactly can you do to motivate innovation from within your organization?
What you measure matters. Consider a bridge built in Laufenburg, a town that straddles Germany and Switzerland. As the two halves of the bridge being built came together, it became (embarrassingly) clear that they would not align because they were at different heights.
Netflix made headlines recently for their unexpected decline in new subscription growth and drop in subscriptions in the US, which pushed their stock price down. Critics are asking if Netflix’s business model is relevant in the changing competitive environment, when Disney and other content owners have started pulling back their content from streaming services like Netflix in order to build their own.
In 1968, Olympic fans and athletes watched in bemusement as a college sophomore jumped over the high bar backward. Until that day, every gold medal winner, indeed every Olympic athlete, who had competed in the high bar had gone over forward. Dick Fosbury literally turned his back on that tradition … won the Olympics … and forever changed the way the competition is played. Within eight years, 90% of high jumpers were using what came to be called the “Fosbury Flop.” Today, the Fosbury Flop is just the way you do things.
Sometimes they don’t know it themselves. When they do, they hide it. But they are out there. Executives, managers, and business owners who want to stem innovation. If you no longer want your organization to try new approaches, if you believe that the best path to growth is to keep doing what has been working for years, this guide is for you.
The word “strategy” too often brings to mind images of uptight executives in boardrooms, with heavy binders and spreadsheets, debating critical choices. Experts will tell you strategy is “a plan of action designed to achieve a major or overall aim.” Strategy is a science, and it’s serious.
In a glass-walled boardroom overlooking the Hudson River wrapping around downtown Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty in the distance, our guest lecturer flicked on one of the strangest slides I’ve seen. Juxtaposed against a sleek, modern room were two medieval paintings. One of a fortress. The other of a ship.
This month, Harvard Business Review featured a compelling piece – “The Age of the Continuous Connection: When You Can Interact with Your Customers 24/7 You Need a New Business Model” – by Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch, co-directors of Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management. The piece inspires some exciting new strategies to stay ahead of the competition. But we think it only scratches the surface of what is possible.
The folks at Fast Company and Forbes this month released their annual “most innovative companies” lists. Like many of us, I look forward to these lists every year. By championing those companies bold enough to challenge the status quo, they inspire all of us to do something different. By sifting from masses of companies the few that we should admire and emulate, they bring clarity to our innovation efforts.
After a flight home long enough to empty my inbox and complete three important pieces of work, I found myself in a quiet house, family sleeping upstairs, with time on my hands. So, I stretched out on my couch and indulged in a movie.
