Ten Tips for the Innovative Leader

I recently read and enjoyed Paul Sloane’s latest book, The Innovative Leader. Here are a list of just some of the gems from this book. It's available at Amazon.com (click the title of the link above and go directly to the page on the Amazon web site).

1. Have a vision for change
You cannot expect your team to be innovative if they do not know the direction in which they are heading. Innovation has to have a purpose. It is up to the leader to set the course and give a bearing for the future.
You need one overarching statement that defines the direction for the business and that people will readily understand and remember.
Great leaders spend time illustrating the vision, goals and challenges. They explain to people how their role is crucial in fulfilling the vision and meeting the challenges. They inspire men and women to become passionate entrepreneurs, finding innovative routes to success.

2. Fight the fear of change
Innovative leaders constantly evangelise the need for change. They replace the comfort of complacency with the hunger of ambition. They'll say, "we are doing well but we cannot rest on our laurels, we need to do even better." They explain that while trying new ventures is risky, standing still is even riskier. They must paint a picture that shows an appealing future that is worth taking risks to achieve. The prospect involves perils and opportunities. The only way to get there is by embracing change.

3. Think like a venture capitalist
VCs use a portfolio approach and balance the risk of losing with the upside of winning. They like to consider lots of proposals. They are comfortable with the knowledge that many of the ideas they back will fail. These are all important lessons for corporate executives who typically consider only a handful of proposals and who abhor failure.

4. Have a dynamic suggestion scheme
Great suggestion schemes are focused, easy to use, well resourced, responsive and open to all. They do not need to offer huge rewards. Recognition and response are generally more important. Above all, they have to have the whole-hearted commitment of the senior team to keep them fresh, properly managed and successful.

5. Break the rules
To achieve radical innovation you have to challenge the assumptions that govern how things should look in your environment. Business is not like sport, with its well defined rules and referees. It is more like art and is rife with opportunity for the lateral thinker who can create new ways to provide the goods and services customers want.

6. Give everyone two jobs
Give all your people two key objectives. Ask them to run their current jobs in the most effective way possible and at the same time to find completely new ways to do the job. Encourage your employees to ask themselves—what is the essential purpose of my role? What is the outcome that I deliver that is of real value to my clients (internal and external)? Is there a better way to deliver that value or purpose? The answer is always "yes", but most people never ask the question.

7. Collaborate
Many CEOs see collaboration as key to their success with innovation. They know they cannot do it all using internal resources. So they look outside for other organisations to partner with. A good example is the Mercedes and Swatch collaboration, which produced the Smart car. Each brought different skills and experiences to the team.

8. Welcome failure
The innovative leader encourages a culture of experimentation. You must teach people that each failure is a step along the road to success. To be truly agile, you must give people the freedom to innovate, experiment and to succeed. That means you must give them the freedom to fail, too.

9. Build prototypes
People's Bank has a refreshingly original attitude to new ideas. "Don't debate it, test it," is the motto of this innovative American financial services organisation. Try the new idea at low cost in a section of the market and see what the customers' reactions are. You will learn far more in the real world than you will in the test laboratory or with focus groups.

10. Be passionate
Focus on the things that you want to change, the most important challenges you face and be passionate about overcoming them. Your energy and drive will translate itself into direction and inspiration for your people. It is no good filling your bus with contented, complacent passengers. You want evangelists, passionate supporters. You want people who believe that reaching the destination is really worthwhile. If you want to inspire people to innovate, to change the way they do things and to achieve extraordinary results, then you have to be passionate about what you believe in and you have to communicate that passion every time you speak..

Paul Sloane is an Advisor to No World Borders, and the founder of Destination Innovation (www.destination-innovation.com). He writes and speaks on lateral thinking and innovation. His book, The Innovative Leader, is published by Kogan-Page.

Semantic Web: Borderless Information for Healthcare, Climate Change, User Generated Content

These developments are strategically aligned with our company's roots. Shared information via a common framework for data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.

Examples:

Semantic Web ('SemWeb") Technology is being used to share information at the Australian Great Barrier Reef Park Authority. Users ("observers") of coral bleaching can self-report incidents to the authority to improve knowledge of the millions of square miles of coast around Australia.

Craigslist, a company with less than 50 employees champions user generated content for Collectivie Wisdom. This is a hugely disruptive development because Craigslist is one of the top 20 most visited sites on the web.

Semantic Webs are being leveraged as a mechanism for improved health care. The World Wide Web Consortium and the Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group , which is chartered to deploy standardized Semantic Web specifications to provide services defined by the user community. Looking to overcome obstacles to data sharing in the life science research and health services communities, W3C seeks a framework supporting semantically rich system, process, and information interoperability. According to W3C, embedding of semantics into medical and research information will offer better access to information needed to find cures for diseases, make drugs safer and more affordable, and enable health care providers to offer individualized clinical management.

Paul Sloane on Innovation

Paul Sloane speaks about innovation. Paul is an advisor to our firm and founder of Destination-Innovation a consultancy that helps organizations improve innovation.

His workshops provide practical techniques to improve leadership and innovation. Clients include American Express, British Telecom, Cendant, Lloyds of London, Motorola, Shell and 3M.

Managing Virtual Teams & The Soccer ("Futbol") Generation

Some companies like Nokia are much better than others at managing virtual teams. At Nokia, they are up to 120 people in size and are much more complex than previously imagined. Finland is a tiny country that had to access markets outside its boundaries, so being virtual is something that Nokia grew up with. When people move into a virtual team, they have met and have prior working history. Also, Nokia is a technology company that helps in virtual management.

Young members of virtual teams have some important attributes, and have been described as members of "...the myspace generation..." meaning that they enjoy casual collaboration. Also, in the U.S. the growth of soccer has contributed to the current generation of new workers having grown up since Kindergarten playing soccer or other team sports. Team orientation and learning is more important culturally to this group. Also, very importantly, soccer (better known as futbol outside the U.S.) is a global sport. American children who used to play American football and baseball have been injected with an understanding of different cultures, names of players, and teams playing on global satellite broadcasts that the prior generation did not experience. So, they are much more apt to seek ways to make a difference and be involved globally than just nationally.

A new survey by Vistage, an organization for CEOs of small and mid-size businesses, found that 31% of the more than 2,000 CEO surveyed listed staffing as their greatest challenge. (Economic uncertainty was second at 21%.) Later in the survey, 45% of the CEOs say that they’ve installed technology that lets employees work remotely. What’s the connection? When asked why they’ve invested in this technology, the most popular answer — 27% — was that it helped them retain staff.

“You have to use technology to attract and retain the best workers,” Vistage CEO Rafael Pastor tells the Business Technology Blog. That’s partly because the generation now entering the workforce is so technically inclined. If a small company is going to be in the running for the best and the brightest of these young workers, it has to be supportive of the way they want to work – which includes using the latest tech.

Not surprisingly, the Vistage survey found that 46% of the CEOs say they’re changing their management style to adapt to the needs of these young workers. Additionally, 30% say that they’re using or planning to use new media like MySpace and blogs in order to market their businesses.

No World Borders has experience managing virtual teams for outsourced projects, including software development and call center processes and management.

Preventing Corporate Antibodies from Killing Innovation

Corporations have antibodies that attempt to kill innovation. Six Sigma for example can take defects out, but it can be counter to the very culture that innovators seek. Companies need to protect ideas and insulate them from too many metrics early in the innovation cycle. Recognizing the difference between measurement and corporate self-assessment is important.

Design thinking vs. analytical thinking can help. Analytical thinking, which most of us were taught in school focuses on “why not?” It helps to disprove ideas as valid. Design thinking is iterative and allows for testing, trial and error. Companies also need to provide processes that aren’t cookbooks but rather that provide frameworks to help thinking without too much rigidity. Managing risk is important too. A tolerance for risk is important. All of the things that companies have done to create quality and efficiency often remove the room for innovation. Small teams are key as well. Some would say that re-creating AT&T Bell Labs doesn't work anymore. Companies have to move too fast. On the other hand, four years from seminal idea to commercial success isn't very long. Setting proper hurdle rates for ROI is key.

Cisco fosters “mass collaboration” to help it realize innovation goals and harvest its investment in acquired assets. Focusing your framework to leverage the input from people, and having the right leadership programs are also important. Drawing in partners and customers to facilitate innovation and open source models will also facilitate innovation. Recognizing the innovators and the people who are better at execution is also important.

The Wall Street Journal recently published videos on the topic which provide inspiration.

Managing innovation is one of the most daunting challenges that businesses face. Not only do they need to come up with new ideas, but they also need to foster a culture that encourages and rewards innovation. Otherwise, they risk being overtaken by their competitors. No World Borders can help you build the right framework for innovation. We'll gladly discuss setting a meeting with you to discuss our growth strategies and innovation techniques.