Tag Archives: growth

25 Secrets to Growing Leaders

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25 Secrets to Growing Leaders

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

1. If you want to grow leaders, meet with them daily.

2. If you want to grow leaders, demand that they disagree with you.

3. If you want to grow leaders, help them with all facets of their lives.

4. If you want to grow leaders, there is no failure, there is only learning.

5. If you want to grow leaders, give them the best work.

6. If you want to grow leaders, protect them.

7. If you want to grow leaders, spend at least two years with them.

8. If you want to grow leaders, push them.

9. If you want to grow leaders, praise them.

10. If you want to grow leaders, get them comfortable with discomfort.

11. If you want to grow leaders, show them who you are.

12. If you want to grow leaders, demand that they use their judgment.

13. If you want to grow leaders, give them just a bit more than they can handle and help them handle it.

14. If you want to grow leaders, show emotion.

15. If you want to grow leaders, tell them the truth, even when it creates anxiety.

16. If you want to grow leaders, always be there for them.

17. If you want to grow leaders, pull a hamstring and make them present in your place.

18. If you want to grow leaders, be willing to compromise your career so their careers can blossom.

19. If you want to grow leaders, when you are on vacation tell everyone they are in charge.

20. If you want to grow leaders, let them chose between to two good options.

21. If you want to grow leaders, pay attention to them.

22. If you want to grow leaders, be consistent.

23. If you want to grow leaders, help them with their anxiety.

24. If you want to grow leaders, trust them.

25. If you want to grow leaders, demonstrate leadership.

Image credit: Unsplash

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How Not to Get in Your Own Way

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How Not to Get in Your Own Way

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you could get another good job at the drop of a hat, how would you work differently? Would you speak your mind or bite your tongue?

If you didn’t care about getting a promotion, would you succumb to groupthink or dissent?

If your ego didn’t get in the way, would you stop following the worn-out recipe and make a new one?

If you don’t judge yourself by the number of people who work for you, would your work be better? Would you choose to work on different projects? How do you feel about that?

If you knew your time at the company was finite, how would your contribution change? Who would you stop working with? Who would you start working with? Wouldn’t that feel good?

If you didn’t care about your yearly rating, wouldn’t your rating improve?

If you cared more about helping others, wouldn’t your talents (and the returns) be multiplied?

If your time horizon was doubled, wouldn’t work on projects that are important at the expense of those that are urgent?

If your ego didn’t block you from working on projects that might fail, wouldn’t you work on projects that could obsolete your best work?

If you cared about the long-term success of the company, wouldn’t you work more with young people to get them ready for the next decade?

If you cared solely about doing the right projects in the right way, wouldn’t you help your best team members move to the most important projects, even if that meant they worked for someone else?

If you cared about helping people develop, would you formalize their development areas and help them grow, or take the easy route and let them flounder?

If you didn’t care about getting the credit, how would you and your work be different? Would the company be better for it? How about your happiness?

If you declined every other meeting and just read the meeting minutes, would that be a problem? And even if there are no meeting minutes to read, don’t you think that you’d get along just fine? And don’t you think you’d get more done?

What would you have to change to work more often with young people?

What would you have to change so your best people could be moved to the most important projects?

What would you have to change so you’d dissent when that’s what’s needed?

What would you have to change to develop others, even if it cost you a promotion?

What would you have to change so you could ditch the urgent projects and start the meaningful ones?

What would you have to change so you could spend more time developing young talent?

What would you have to change so you could attend fewer meetings and make more progress?

What would you have to change so you could work on the most outlandish projects?

What’s in the way of looking inside and figuring out how to live differently?

If you were able to change, who would you start work with? Who would you stop working with? Which projects would you start and which would you stop? Which meetings would you skip? Who are the three young people you’d help grow?

If you were able to change, would you be better for it? And how about the people that work with you? And how about your family? And wouldn’t your company be better for it?

So I ask you – What’s in the way? And what are you going to do about it?

Image credit: Pexels

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Let Yourself Draw Inspiration from Others

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Let Yourself Draw Inspiration from Others

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you try something new, check to see who has done something similar. Decompose their design approach. What were they trying to achieve? What outcome were they looking for? Who were their target customers? Do this for at least three existing designs – three real examples that are for sale today.

Here’s a rule to live by: When trying something new, don’t start from scratch.

What you are trying to achieve is unique, but has some commonality with existing solutions. The outcome you are looking for is unique, but it’s similar to outcomes others have tried to achieve. Your target customers are unique, but some of their characteristics are similar to the customers of the solutions you’ll decompose.

Here’s another rule: There are no “clean sheet” sheet designs, so don’t try to make one.

There was an old game show called Name That Tune, where contestants would try to guess the name of a song by hearing just a few notes. The player wins when they can name the tune with the *fewest* notes. And it’s the same with new designs – you want to provide a novel customer experience using the fewest new notes.

A rule: Reuse what you can, until you can’t.

Because the customer is the one who decides if your new offering offers them new value, the novel elements of your design don’t have to look drastically different in a side-by-side comparison way. But the novel elements of your offering do have to make a significant difference in the customer’s life. With that said, however, it can be helpful if the design element responsible for the novel goodness is visually different from the existing alternatives. But if that’s not the case, you can add a non-functional element to the novelty-generating element to make it visible to the customer. For example, you could add color, or some type of fingerprint, to the novel element of the design so that customers can see what creates the novelty for them. Then, of course, you market the heck out of the new color or fingerprint.

A rule: It’s better to make a difference in a customer’s life than, well, anything else.

Don’t be shy about learning from what other companies have done well. That’s not to say you should violate their patents, but it’s a compliment when you adopt some of their best stuff. Learn from them and twist it. Understand what they did and abstract it. See the best in two designs and combine them. See the goodness in one domain and bring it to another.

Doing something for the first time is difficult, why not get inspiration from others and make it easier?

Image credit: Unsplash

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of June 2023

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of June 2023Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are June’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Generation AI Replacing Generation Z — by Braden Kelley
  2. Mission Critical Doesn’t Mean What You Think it Does — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  3. “I don’t know,” is a clue you’re doing it right — by Mike Shipulski
  4. 5 Tips for Leaders Navigating Uncertainty – From Executives at P&G, CVS, Hannaford, and Intel — by Robyn Bolton
  5. Reverse Innovation — by Mike Shipulski
  6. Change Management Best Practices for Maximum Adoption — by Art Inteligencia
  7. Making Employees Happy at Work — by David Burkus
  8. 4 Things Leaders Must Know About Artificial Intelligence and Automation — by Greg Satell
  9. Be Human – People Will Notice — by Mike Shipulski
  10. How to Fail Your Way to Success — by Robyn Bolton

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in May that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last three years:

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Sustaining Imagination is Hard

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by Braden Kelley

Recently I stumbled across a new Royal Institute video of Martin Reeves, a managing director and senior partner in BCG’s San Francisco office. Martin leads the BCG Henderson Institute, BCG’s vehicle for exploring ideas from beyond the world of business, which have implications for business strategy management.

I previously interviewed Martin along with his co-author Dr. Jack Fuller in a post titled ‘Building an Imagination Machine‘. In this video you’ll find him presenting content along similar themes. I think you’ll enjoy it:

Bonus points to anyone who can name this napkin sketch in the comments.

In the video Martin explores several of the frameworks introduced in his book The Imagination Machine. One of the central tenets of Martin’s video is the fact that sustaining imagination is hard. There are three core reasons why this is so:

  1. Overspecialization – As companies grow, jobs become increasingly smaller in scope and greater in specialization, leading to myopia as fewer and fewer people see the problems that the company started to solve in the first place
  2. Insularity – As companies grow, the majority of employees shift from being externally facing to being internally facing, isolating more and more employees from the customer and their evolving wants and needs
  3. Complacency – As companies become successful, predictably, the successful parts of the business receive most of the attention and investment, making it difficult for new efforts to receive the care and feeding necessary for them to grow and dare I say – replace – the currently idolized parts of the business

I do like the notion Martin presents that companies wishing to be continuously successful, continuously seek to be surprised and invest energy in rethinking, exploring and probing in areas where they find themselves surprised.

Martin also explores some of the common misconceptions about imagination, including the ideas that imagination is:

  1. A solitary endeavor
  2. It comes out of nowhere
  3. Unmanageable

And finally, Martin puts forward his ideas on how imagination can be harnessed systematically, using a simple six-step model:

  1. Seduction – Where can we find surprise?
  2. Idea – Do we embrace the messiness of the napkin sketch? Or expect perfection?
  3. Collision – Where can we collide this idea with the real world for validation or more surprise?
  4. Epidemic – How can we foster collective imagination? What behaviors are we encouraging?
  5. New Ordinary – How can we create new norms? What evolvable scripts can we create that live inbetween the 500-page manual and the one-sentence vision?
  6. Encore – How can we sustain imagination? How can we maintain a Day One mentality?

And no speech in 2023 would be complete without some analysis of what role artificial intelligence (AI) has to play. Martin’s perspective is that when it comes to the different levels of cognition, AI might be good at finding patterns of correlation, but humans have more advanced capabilities than machines when it comes to finding causation and counterfactual opportunities. There is an opportunity for all of us to think about how we can leverage AI across the six steps in the model above to accelerate or enhance our human efforts.

To close, Martin highlighted that when it comes to leading re-imagination, it is important to look outward, to self-disrupt, to establish heroic goals, utilize multiple mental models, and foster playfulness and experimentation across the organization to help keep imagination alive.

p.s. If you’re committed to learning the art and science of getting to the future first, then be sure and subscribe to my newsletter to make sure you’re one of the first to get certified in the FutureHacking™ methodology.

Image credits: Netflix

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Instant Revenue

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Instant Revenue

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want to grow the top line right now, create a hard constraint – the product cannot change – and force the team to look for growth outside the product. Since all the easy changes to the product have been made, without a breakthrough the small improvements bring diminishing returns. There’s nothing left here. Make them look elsewhere.

If you want to grow the top line without changing the product, make it easier for customers to buy the products you already have.

If you want to make it easier for customers to buy what you have, eliminate all things that make buying difficult. Though this sounds obvious and trivial, it’s neither. It’s exceptionally difficult to see the waste in your processes from the customers’ perspective. The blackbelts know how to eliminate waste from the company’s perspective, but they’ve not been taught to see waste from the customers’ perspective. Don’t believe me? Look at the last three improvements you made to the customers’ buying process and ask yourself who benefitted from those changes. Odds are, the changes you made reduced the number of people you need to process the transactions by pushing the work back into the customers’ laps. This is the opposite of making it easier for your customers to buy.

Have you ever run a project to make it easier for customers to buy from you?

If you want to make it easier for customers to buy the products you have, pretend you are a customer and map their buying process. What you’ll likely learn is that it’s not easy to buy from you.

1. How can you make it easier for the customer to choose the right product to buy?

Please don’t confuse this with eliminating the knowledgeable people who talk on the phone with customers. And, fight the urge to display all your products all at once. Minimize their choices, don’t maximize them.

2. How can you make it easier for customers to buy what they bought last time?

A hint: when an existing customer hits your website, the first thing they should see is what they bought last time. Or, maybe, a big button that says – click here to buy [whatever they bought last time]. This, of course, assumes you can recognize them and can quickly match them to their buying history.

3. How can you make it easier for customers to pay for your product?

Here’s a rule to live by: if they don’t pay, you don’t sell. And here’s another: you get no partial credit when a customer almost pays.

As you make these improvements, customers will buy more. You can use the incremental profits to fund the breakthrough work to obsolete your best products.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2022

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2022Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are September’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. You Can’t Innovate Without This One Thing — by Robyn Bolton

  2. Importance of Measuring Your Organization’s Innovation Maturity — by Braden Kelley

  3. 3 Ways to Get Customer Insights without Talking to Customers
     — by Robyn Bolton

  4. Four Lessons Learned from the Digital Revolution — by Greg Satell

  5. Are You Hanging Your Chief Innovation Officer Out to Dry? — by Teresa Spangler

  6. Why Good Job Interviews Don’t Lead to Good Job Performance — by Arlen Meyers, M.D.

  7. Six Simple Growth Hacks for Startups — by Soren Kaplan

  8. Why Diversity and Inclusion Are Entrepreneurial Competencies
     — by Arlen Meyers, M.D.

  9. The Seven P’s of Raising Money from Investors — by Arlen Meyers, M.D.

  10. What’s Next – The Only Way Forward is Through — by Braden Kelley

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in August that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last two years:

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

How To Attract, Grow and Retain Your Best Employees

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How To Attract, Grow and Retain Your Best Employees

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

In a recent article, Why Employees Stay, I shared seven reasons why employees would want to continue working for a company. No. 5 on the list was that the company offers career growth and promotes from within. Let’s unpack that one, as it seems to be a top reason some companies are able to attract and keep good employees.

There are two parts to this idea. Growth and promotions. They don’t always go together.

1. Growth

Growth comes from training and on-the-job experience. Employees like to grow their skills, knowledge and capabilities. Even though good employees may come to the job with certain skills, they are often onboarded with training. In some cases, the training takes weeks—even months.

Zappos.com, the online retailer known for its stellar customer service, puts new employees through four weeks of training. “The whole point of the four weeks is to build relationships and make sure you’re comfortable in your role,” says corporate trainer Stephanie Hudec.

That’s four weeks before the employee is actually ready to do the job. That’s a hefty investment of time, energy and dollars, just to get someone “game ready” for their job. Or is it?

Zappos built its reputation with an emphasis on customer service. Putting someone in a customer-facing role who isn’t properly trained and ready could diminish the brand’s reputation.

But the training isn’t a one-and-done effort during the onboarding process. Employees are looking to grow. A few weeks in the beginning gets them to a level of proficiency for their current role, but many want more. They want to add to existing capabilities.

2. Promotions

Promotions are career opportunities within the company. It’s obvious that someone who has been at their job for months will be far better than the first day they started. They have to learn the system and processes, adapt their skills and abilities to their responsibilities, and more. Day one is the beginning of “ramping up” to a place where the employee is meeting the employer’s expectations. And then they go beyond.

Often, growth occurs due to training and education. Employees are trained, and the result is that they get better, smarter and more capable. But it takes something more, and that comes from the employee. The employee who is intent on growing must also take initiative and push themselves to grow to the next level.

Employers need to recognize this growth in both capabilities and initiative and take advantage of it, moving that employee through the ranks. Companies that are known for “promoting from within” are very appealing to employees. They attract good people and are better at getting them to stay.

Starting At the Bottom

We’ve all heard of “rags to riches” type stories of employees starting at the bottom in the mailroom and ending up in the boardroom. Some executives who started in the mailroom of their respective companies:

  • George Bodenheimer, president of ESPN

  • Dick Grasso, former New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) chairman

  • Krista Bourne, COO of Verizon

Maybe all three of these executives had ambitions to be successful from the beginning, but did any of them ever think they would be in the boardroom after starting their careers in the mailroom? Maybe, maybe not. But they didn’t get to those positions on their own. It’s important to recognize that employees who went to work in the mailroom and grew into important roles in their organizations didn’t get there on their own. They had training, great managers, caring coaches and helpful mentors.

There are plenty of stories of successful executives starting at the bottom. Many of them move and grow from company to company. Recognize that a chance to grow is important to today’s employees. A company that invests in the continuous growth of skills (customer service, leadership, technical, etc.) is better at recruiting new employees and keeping existing employees, but not always forever. Yes, in the perfect world, this growth would coincide with promotion opportunities inside the company, but it doesn’t have to. Just know you may be “growing” the employee to move on if you don’t move them up.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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Don’t Forget Branding as You Look for Business Growth

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Don't Forget Branding as You Look for Business Growth

People underestimate the importance of brand as they look to grow their business beyond their initial set of successful products and services. But, if you grow your business beyond your brand you’re doomed to fail.

Few of us have the luxury of being branding experts. Many of us can’t afford to engage an expensive branding agency to conduct a brand study.

Most small business owners are busy with the day-to-day operations of their business. The money they do have to spend on sales and marketing, they tend to invest in demand generation. This is a very logical choice as every business must maximize its revenue and minimize expenses to keep the lights on. But, if your business has been successful and has grown, you may find yourself in a slightly different situation.

Many companies that succeed and grow reach a point where that growth begins to taper off. It is often at this point where entrepreneurs begin to think about adding new products or services in new areas beyond their initial focus. If you choose to ignore the role of your brand at this point, you do so at your own peril.

A brand is more than the name of your business, your products, or your logo. If you have done a good job running your business, delivering your products and services, and the experiences around them, then your brand will stand for something – and might be worth something (brand equity). But what your brand stands for, your brand identity, is something that ultimately you do not control.

Yes, you can invest in brand positioning to shape your brand identity, but ultimately your customers (and non-customers) determine what your brand stands for. This fact is important as you look to expand your business into new areas you’re not currently in, to sell new products and services you don’t currently sell. The brand you have built up to this point will either be an asset or a liability as you look to grow into these new areas.

Your business exists because customers give it permission to exist. It can only grow into areas that prospective customers give it permission to grow into. If Taco Bell decides to enter the healthcare business, would you find them credible? Would you trust them to diagnose and treat you?

There must be an overlap between the directions you want to grow your business and the directions that prospective customers trust you to grow your business. If your new products and services don’t lie within the mental circle of trust that exists in the collective minds of your prospective customers, you will struggle.

Notice the focus on ‘prospective customers’ as I speak about your growth areas. This is because as you grow into new areas, your circle of trust may intersect with new people who are aware of your brand that are not currently your customers. Yes, your brand means something, even to those people who are NOT your customers.

You must mind your brand positioning and brand permissions not just with customers for your current products and services, but also with the most likely customers of the new products and services you’re hoping will provide the future growth of your business.

So, how do you find out what your brand stands for and what areas you can credibly extend into?

Unfortunately, there is no way to find this out without making an investment into interviewing people. Here are some options:

  1. Pay a branding or market research agency to do this for you
  2. Pay someone who works at one of these agencies to conduct these interviews for you as a side hustle through a gig worker exchange like fiverr
  3. Create a short & sharp list of 2-3 questions to ask a handful of customers that quickly get to the heart of what your brand stands for and whether they view you as credible in the new area you’re considering
  4. Use this same list of questions to quickly ask customers of businesses you view as potential competitors in the growth areas you’re looking to enter
  5. Pay some of your customers, that you have a good relationship with and will give you the time and honest feedback, to spend more time understanding why they do business with you now and what other kinds of products & services they would trust you to provide

Whether you lack money or courage, there are options above to overcome either limitation. If you lack both, then see my previous article on what I’ve learned from becoming an accidental entrepreneur.

For the rest of you, I hope that you will heed the warnings of this article, find the suggestions useful, incorporate them as you consider potential areas to grow your business into, and select those products and services to invest in where you have both credibility and ability to execute with excellence.

Keep innovating!

This article originally appeared on Entrepreneur.com

Image credit: Pixabay


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Why Design Thinking is Essential for Corporate Transformation and Growth

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Why Design Thinking is Essential for Corporate Transformation and Growth

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, successfully adapting to change is crucial for corporate transformation and sustained growth. Design thinking, a human-centered approach to problem-solving, has emerged as a powerful framework that enables organizations to innovate, empathize with customers, and build truly impactful solutions. This article deep dives into the essence of design thinking and highlights its significance through two compelling case studies, demonstrating how it can drive corporate transformation and foster growth.

Case Study 1: Airbnb – Reinventing the Travel Experience

Airbnb’s journey from a struggling startup to a hospitality giant can be closely attributed to their embrace of design thinking principles. Before design thinking’s integration, the founders realized the existing travel industry lacked a sense of personal connection and authenticity. Empathy was at the core of their transformational journey.

By immersing themselves in the customer experience, Airbnb identified the unmet needs of travelers seeking unique, local experiences. Design thinking empowered Airbnb to empathize with their users, conducting interviews, and gathering insights. This led to the creation of impactful solutions that transformed the travel experience completely. Through the power of design, they bridged the gap, creating a platform that revolutionized the industry, connecting hosts with travelers worldwide.

Case Study 2: IBM – Shifting Focus Towards User-Driven Solutions

As a technology leader, IBM faced the challenge of staying relevant and competitive in a rapidly evolving market. They recognized the need to prioritize user experience and demonstrated their commitment to design thinking for corporate transformation.

IBM embarked on a company-wide transformation by placing design thinking at the forefront of their initiatives. They invested in comprehensive training programs, ensuring every employee understood and practiced design-led problem-solving. This shift in mindset allowed IBM to emphasize user-driven solutions throughout their innovation processes, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and higher quality products. By incorporating design thinking, IBM acknowledged the significance of empathy, creativity, and collaboration in driving company-wide growth.

Key Principles of Design Thinking:

1. Empathy: Design thinking emphasizes understanding the needs and emotions of end-users to create products and services that truly resonate. This empathetic approach helps companies identify pain-points and opportunities for innovation.

2. Iterative Thinking: Design thinking embraces an iterative process, enabling organizations to experiment, learn, and refine ideas based on real-time feedback. This flexible approach minimizes risks and maximizes chances of success.

3. Collaboration: Design thinking is inherently collaborative, encouraging cross-functional teams to work together towards a common goal. By integrating diverse perspectives, organizations foster innovation and create holistic solutions.

4. Visualization: Design thinking promotes visual representation, helping teams articulate and communicate ideas effectively. Visualization bridges the gap between stakeholders and enables faster decision-making.

Conclusion

Design thinking emerges as an indispensable tool for corporate transformation and growth. As demonstrated by Airbnb and IBM, this human-centered approach empowers organizations to connect with customers on a deeper level, drive innovation, and create solutions that positively impact lives. By embracing empathy, collaboration, and iterative thinking, companies can unlock hidden potential, revolutionize industries, and secure a sustainable path towards growth in an ever-changing business ecosystem.

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pexels

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