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.
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.
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.
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.
Do your people go into the kitchen … or do they go home?
When Kat Cole, a waiter at a local Hooters, learned there were not enough cooks that day to serve food, she watched as other waiters hung up their aprons. No food to cook means no food to serve, they figured.
We usually get it wrong. When trying to predict the path of innovations – which ones are hype, which ones are real, which ones will take hold, and which ones will fall out of favor – our record, as humans, is poor. We think this is because, in the study of innovation, people overlook a critical factor.
In my first article of this series on strategic openings, I covered three of the seven strategies successful companies used to create disruptive innovations that set them apart from the competition.
In chess, successful players know that a strong opening can give them the advantage to win the game. In fact, studies have shown that Grandmaster chess players often draw on something entirely “un-logical” from their playbook to create an unexpected opening. This is what gives them an early competitive edge over their opponent.
General Electric just announced it is selling off GE Digital, the much-hyped software business based in California and a keystone in GE’s strategy to transform itself from an unfocused conglomerate (in financial services and media) into a digital player that would usher in the next industrial era, creating the “industrial internet of things.”
