Innovation, leadership, and life

The legendary Jack Welch.

Tue, 3 Jun 2008 22:09:38 -0400

One of the great things about having both Suzy Welch and Jack Welch on the same show is that you get to see leadership from several different dimensions. Jack, from his two-decades of leadership at the helm of GE. Suzy, from her many years as an editor and journalist covering business.

I thought Jack underscored a few very important aspects about innovation in his interview on air: Innovation is an every day act of many, rather than a special act for just a few. His leadership mantra—the boundaryless organization—that so characterized his era at GE, is a vital foundation for any innovation endeavor.

But even venerable organizations like GE have to learn new things in order to innovate. The discipline, competitiveness, and courage Jack instilled at GE—even these—aren’t enough to guarantee results from innovation.

My firm—SYPartners—worked with Jeff Immelt, Jack’s successor at GE, on a program to increase GE’s capacity to drive organic growth through innovation. The intent of the work we did was twofold: To create a understandable process for innovation across all of GE’s business units—from appliances to plastics to financial services. And second, to work to develop the leadership traits required to deliver real results from innovation. It was all part of a show-case program called The Imagination Breakthrough program.

The process of innovation, it turned out, challenges and builds different muscles than the brilliant running of the business every day. That is, it requires more exploration...more open-mindedness...a higher ability to deal with the unknown. The process we developed at GE had several essential elements—a kind of flow of innovation, if you will:

Explore
Immerse
Ideate
Envision
Hypothesize
Design
Refine
Market

In another blog entry, I’ll go deeper on each. But what’s interesting is as GE leaders mastered this new way of working, they had to build different leadership behaviors too. GE leaders had always been courageous, as an example—for making tough decisions, for taking poor-performing employees out of the business, for rigorous strategy processes. What’s interesting is that to be good innovators they had to be courageous about very different things—leaning into their fears, recognizing what they didn’t know, admitting they didn’t have the perfect answer, and for shepherding ideas (a wholly different act that progressing conversation for decision-making).

My point? Even the very best of the best have to go back to school to learn to innovate. Think about how even your best strengths need to be reframed, so you can be a better generator of new value.

See. Believe. Think. Act.

Mon, 2 Jun 2008 23:13:53 -0400

I think it’s interesting, the worse the economy gets, the more companies tend to pull back. We all know that in business it’s action that creates new value—for customers, for employees, for other stakeholders, and certainly for shareowners. With rare exception, companies become valuable only when they take action in the market. And obviously, innovation efforts—truly challenging the status quo to create new value—require action.

All that said, in times of downturn, this focus on action becomes especially acute: Everyone wants to focus on purely the pragmatic. So a lot of management’s time is spent narrowing the scope of attention—employees should focus on very specific tasks. While I’m not saying battening down the hatches is a poor strategy, I will say, that only doing so closes off innovation and future value. Innovation not only requires action, it requires new thinking. And leaders need to allow time, nurture time, allot time to have teams think. This thinking-acting loop is critical for creating new value—think differently, act differently.

But what makes for radical thinking? Actually, that requires something even harder: Challenging beliefs—about opportunity, the status quo, new profit pools, what customers truly want, who is talented enough to pull it off, and so forth. Great innovators actively challenge their beliefs. So what permits that? Letting people see. Leaders rarely spend enough time looking at the world—for gaps, for rituals, for symbols, for experiences, for opportunities that matter.

The mantra for innovation is see, believe, think, act. It sounds simple, maybe even trite. But we’ve found that companies that follow this pattern significantly outperform those who pay attention only to the action part of management. I’ll elaborate more in my daily postings this week...

The Human Element

Fri, 30 May 2008 22:57:51 -0400

Our very first show on The Business of Innovation is focused on The Human Element. That is, the role that employees play in the process of innovation. I think it’s important, before we dive into the topic, to have some working definition of “innovation.” It’s a word that is bandied about so much within business these days; my friend Alan Webber says, “It’s a dime-store word.” I think he has a point.

At SYPartners (the company I founded 15 years ago), the definition we use is: Innovation is about challenging the status quo to create new value. We say “challenging” the status quo because fundamentally it’s about looking at the world, and finding some aspect of it that deserves to be different. That may mean entirely over-turning a business model, way of working, or creating something that hasn’t existed before. But often, it actually is about simple recombinations of elements that already exist. That’s the point. Innovation is as simple as, and as complex as, the diversity of human beings that dare to attempt it.

Innovation depends on seeing the world in a new way, that allows you to reframe that world, to create new possibility—something worthy and valuable. The Human Element is a show that talks about that. Over the following five weeks, I’m going to blog about the topics of each show. I hope you’ll tune in, or subscribe to the RSS feed.