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Focus Group Results
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Ever wonder how your views on leadership stack up against those of your peers?
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Having a Great Company
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Want to have a great company? Across all industries and in a surprisingly broad range of economic conditions, only 6% - that’s about one in 17 - consistently out-perform their peers.
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| Business Innovation…Table Stakes for "Stayin Alive"
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We often begin engagements with an intergroup competition calling for teams of people to assemble a "product" or achieve a goal by working together toward a "best of breed" solution. The measure of success can be time, cost, aesthetics or functionality. The process is usually chaotic as participants address their challenge with their customary style, and the outcome always varies widely among teams. Beyond group dynamics, though, the point is to create a metaphor for competition…a shared experience from which to discuss how groups with identical resources can achieve vastly different results.
The answer, of course, is innovation…novel thinking around product, process or the underlying "theory of the business".
Without a doubt, every manager wants to be innovative and hopes for the same from employees. Achieving it, though, calls for much more than desire. In many ways, the "business innovation movement" is today where the "quality movement" was in the early 80's. One important difference is that while it took nearly 15 years to make quality a standard, the "new economy" will make business innovation a precondition for survival in less than a third of that time.
As we've reported previously, across all industries and economic conditions, only about 6% of participants claim consistently superior performance as measured by profitability, return on assets, product commercialization, job creation, and stock valuation. How do they do it…specifically? While there are no easy answers, we have found five principles that invariably accompany robust business innovation:
Mindsets - Great companies companies know that complacency is the thief of innovation. Such companies foster a culture of "no-fault discontent" in which people constantly call current practice into question. "What are the conditions under which we could close a loan in 3 hours…schedule touch-labor precisely for the schedule variations we experience…?" This requires that the whole system remain open to inspection…not easy for those seeking standardization and managerial control.
Tools - It does little good to simply empower people or exhort themto be creative. “Launch and learn” has to be augmented with tools for innovation…such as the software that allows you to plan a garden or design a house, serving up options and inviting their flexible application. National Semiconductor regularly sees several hundred engineers visiting their site to make use of their previously proprietary design tools, thus outsourcing innovation to their customers.
Peripheral Vision - A three-year old "houseguest" of ours recently spent a quiet moment coloring while we and his parents talked. When he tore his paper in a fit of artistic frenzy, he crawled to his newborn sister's diaperbag, "borrowed" the tab from the disposable and quietly repaired his work. Like Einstein, he knew that "an idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem on which you are currently working." Years of schooling and supervision put minds like his in the box. That is why companies like AT&T launch an Opportunity Discovery Department, P&G sponsors its fabled Business Discontinuity Boot Camp and Nortel underwrites Future First initiatives. Each is an attempt to systematize the kind of "peripheral vision" that encourages people to see adhesion in one environment and recognize its commercial value in their own.
Different Perspectives - Innovation has its roots in the capacity to play; and the most exciting play involves diversity - unexpected combinations of experience, demography, function, context and point of view. Research shows that commercially important innovations…70% in chemical processing equipment and 80% in scientific instruments, for example…are often developed by customers rather than the companies that bring them to market. The wisdom of lead user studies and other “discovery marketing initiatives” is that they consciously pull people of differing backgrounds together to wrestle with a target challenge.
Leadership - Of the 3,100 books in print on leadership, a quick classification would suggest that people lead through vision, example, permissiveness, incentives or some adaptive combination of the four. Regardless of one's preferred style, a continuously innovative company must be visibly led in the notion that creativity is a core value. Following an industry-wide crisis averted by company geologists, for example, the CEO of a mining firm we know rewarded the team and their families with a trip anyplace in the world with the sole requirement that they look at something geological. Dozens of downstream breakthroughs can be traced to those "vacations".
These elements"go to work" in a process that can be both mapped and managed.
The Futurist reflects the sentiment that "there will be more change in the next 25 years than there has been in the last 100." This means that your adaptations will have to be launched at least four times as rapidly…and successfully…as in your career experience to date. "Bookmark" the opportunities for improvement in your environment; then let us partner with you to enhance your competence in Business Innovation.
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