In today’s dynamic business environment, organizations often face the need for cultural change to stay competitive and adapt to new market demands. Cultural change management refers to the structured approach and strategies employed by leaders to facilitate successful transformations within an organization’s culture. This article aims to explore effective strategies for cultural change management by presenting two case studies that exemplify successful cultural change initiatives.
Case Study 1 – IBM
IBM, a technology giant, embarked on a significant cultural change management initiative in the 1990s. At the time, the company was facing multiple challenges, including a rigid hierarchy and siloed departments that hindered collaboration. Recognizing the need for change, IBM’s CEO, Lou Gerstner, implemented several strategies:
1. Clear Vision and Communication: Gerstner articulated a clear vision for IBM’s future as a client-focused, solutions-driven company. He communicated this vision extensively to employees, shareholders, and customers, ensuring a unified understanding of the desired cultural transformation.
2. Training and Development: IBM invested heavily in training and development programs to equip employees with the necessary skills to adapt to the changing landscape. The company developed educational programs, such as the “e-business Institute,” which provided training in emerging technologies and client-oriented practices.
3. Collaborative Decision-Making: IBM fostered a culture of collaboration and inclusiveness by involving employees at all levels in decision-making processes. Initiatives such as “World Jam,” an online brainstorming platform, enabled employees worldwide to share ideas and engage in dialogue, breaking down silos and promoting a sense of ownership.
4. Recognizing and Celebrating Success: IBM acknowledged and celebrated the achievements of individuals and teams who embraced the cultural change. This recognition fostered a positive environment, encouraging others to embrace the desired behaviors.
The successful implementation of these strategies led to a cultural shift at IBM, transforming the company from a hardware-focused business to a global technology and consulting leader.
Case Study 2 – Zappos
Zappos, an online retailer renowned for its exceptional customer service, underwent a cultural change management initiative to maintain its strong organizational culture during rapid growth. In 2013, the company implemented a managerial framework called “Holacracy” to enhance employee empowerment, autonomy, and decision-making.
1. Holacracy Implementation: Zappos introduced Holacracy, a non-hierarchical management approach that aimed to distribute authority and decision-making throughout the organization. The framework emphasized self-organization, accountability, and transparency. Employees were grouped into self-governing roles and circles, allowing greater flexibility and adaptability.
2. Employee Involvement: Zappos actively involved employees in the implementation of Holacracy by encouraging their input and soliciting feedback. The company recognized the importance of engaging employees in the change process and allowing them to shape their own work environment.
3. Continuous Learning: Zappos placed a strong emphasis on providing training and support to help employees understand and adapt to the new management framework. Regular workshops, mentoring programs, and knowledge-sharing initiatives were conducted to nurture a learning culture.
4. Respecting Core Values: Throughout the cultural change, Zappos remained committed to its core values of delivering exceptional customer service and maintaining a positive, supportive company culture. This consistent focus on values helped anchor the change within a familiar framework.
Zappos’ cultural change management efforts based on Holacracy resulted in increased employee engagement, operational efficiency, and innovation.
Conclusion
Cultural change management requires a holistic and strategic approach tailored to an organization’s specific needs. The case studies of IBM and Zappos showcase successful strategies, including clear vision and communication, training and development, employee involvement, and upholding core values. These strategies, when implemented effectively, foster a positive cultural shift and enable organizations to thrive amidst change. By embracing cultural change management, companies can remain adaptable, innovative, and ready to meet the challenges of the ever-evolving business landscape.
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As today’s volatile business climate demands that organizations continuously improve and innovate, developing a culture of continuous improvement is essential for organizations to stay competitive. While this may seem like a daunting task, there are certain steps managers can take to foster a culture of continuous improvement.
1. Talk About Continuous Improvement
The first step to developing a culture of continuous improvement is to make sure that the organization is actually talking about it. Whether it’s part of the mission statement, a portion of an all-staff meeting, or a project goal, the importance of continuous improvement should be prominent.
2. Embrace Failure
Failures must be seen as learning opportunities instead of causes for retribution or punishment. By embedded this mind-set throughout the organization, employees will be more likely to try out new ideas instead of playing it safe.
3. Promote Innovation
Encourage employees to think about how their tasks can be implemented more effectively or replaced with new technologies or processes. Employ systems like suggestion boxes and make sure that employees are aware that their ideas will not be judged but instead be seen as opportunities for improvement.
4. Make Continuous Improvement a Priority
Leaders should identify areas in need of improvement and then set objectives and determine the necessary resources for those objectives. For example, if the goal is to reduce overhead costs, the organization should form a task force or committee that is focused on meeting that goal.
5. Communicate the Benefits of Continuous Improvement
Explain to employees why continuous improvement is important for the organization. Help them understand how the specific improvements will lead to specific benefits, such as cost savings, increased efficiency, or better customer service.
Another Approach
The workplace has changed drastically in recent years, as organizations are increasingly looking to create a culture of continuous improvement. With this kind of environment, employees are constantly motivated and challenged to learn and grow, leading to better results and more satisfied customers. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing such a culture, there are a few tips and strategies that can help get your organization on the right track.
#1 Embrace Technology
Technology plays a major role in the ability to create a culture of continuous improvement. It enables employees to quickly connect with each other from any location, share ideas, and get feedback. It also allows businesses to automate and streamline various processes to free up time for more critical thinking and creativity. Investing in the right technology can have a tremendous impact on the success of your efforts.
Case Study: Netflix — The streaming giant is renowned for its culture of continuous improvement, having managed to adapt to changing market forces and create products and services that customers love. Technology is a major reason why. From their streaming platform itself to their internal systems, Netflix has embraced the power of technology to optimize workflows and enable faster decisions.
#2 Encourage Autonomy and Collaboration
Creating a culture of continuous improvement means providing employees with the freedom to think, act, and create on their own, without having to wait for lengthy approval processes or wait in line to discuss an idea with a manager. As such, businesses should provide employees with the autonomy to decide how they want to tackle a problem and collaborate with others in order to come up with creative solutions.
Case Study: Amazon — The e-commerce giant is all about autonomy and collaboration. This is evidenced by their flat structure, which allows employees to communicate and collaborate without having to go through a hierarchical chain of command. This has enabled their employees to think more creatively, come up with better solutions, and move faster than the competition.
#3 Celebrate Success
Creating a culture of continuous improvement requires positive reinforcement and recognition for employees who are doing a great job. Whether it is through awards, bonuses, public recognition, or other forms of reward, celebrating success is vital to encouraging employees to push themselves and come up with innovative solutions.
Case Study: Apple — The tech giant is known for its passion for innovation and has long relied on recognition and encouragement to drive their employees to excel. The company regularly recognizes employees for their successes in their internal publications, while also providing rewards and bonuses for noteworthy accomplishments. This emphasis on celebrating and recognizing employees has fostered a culture of continuous improvement, driving Apple to the top of their industry.
Conclusion
Creating a culture of continuous improvement requires commitment and a forward-thinking approach to management, but the long-term benefits are invaluable. With these tips and examples, businesses can start to build a culture where employees are encouraged to learn and grow, and customers benefit from better products and services.
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Corporate culture is a set of shared values, beliefs, and attitudes that guide how an organization operates and interacts with its employees, customers, and partners. As companies grow and evolve, their culture often needs to change in order to stay relevant and competitive. Change management is a process used to help organizations successfully transition from one state to another. It includes activities such as identifying the need for change, outlining goals and objectives, planning and implementing the change, and monitoring and evaluating the results. Change management plays an important role in corporate culture change, as it helps ensure that the desired changes are made in a smooth and efficient manner.
Case Study 1: Airbnb
Airbnb is a popular home-sharing platform that has experienced tremendous growth over the past decade. As the company expanded, its culture and values needed to evolve in order to keep up with the changing business environment. To facilitate this change, Airbnb implemented a comprehensive change management program. This included engaging stakeholders, communicating the need for change, and providing employees with training and support. Additionally, the company created a set of core values that serve as the foundation for all of its decisions. These values include being open and honest, being a host of trust, and creating a sense of belonging. By taking the time to ensure that all stakeholders were on board with the transition, Airbnb was able to successfully transform its culture and continue to grow and thrive.
Case Study 2: Microsoft
Microsoft is a global technology giant that is constantly innovating and adapting to the changing business environment. In recent years, the company has made a concerted effort to shift its corporate culture from one that was focused on competition and individual achievement to one that emphasizes collaboration and team work. To facilitate this transition, Microsoft implemented a comprehensive change management program. This included engaging stakeholders, providing employees with training and support, and communicating the need for change. Additionally, the company created a set of core values that serve as the foundation for all of its decisions. These values include being passionate, having a growth mindset, and embracing diversity. Through its change management program, Microsoft was able to successfully transform its culture and continue to be a leader in the technology industry.
Conclusion
Change management plays an important role in corporate culture change. By engaging stakeholders, communicating the need for change, and providing employees with training and support, organizations can successfully transition from one state to another in a smooth and efficient manner. This is exemplified by the case studies of Airbnb and Microsoft, who both implemented comprehensive change management programs in order to successfully transform their cultures and remain competitive in their respective industries.
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A culture of innovation is a working environment in which creative thinking, experimentation, and risk-taking are encouraged and rewarded. It is a way of working that values the development of new ideas, products, and processes. It is also a culture that supports collaboration and open communication in order to foster creativity, problem-solving, and innovation.
Fostering a Culture of Innovation
When it comes to fostering a culture of innovation in the workplace, there are a few key steps that can be taken to get the ball rolling. By encouraging employees to think creatively and to be open to new ideas, businesses can create an atmosphere of growth and progress that can lead to increased productivity and revenue.
1. Set Clear Goals – Make sure that all employees are aware of the company’s vision and mission. Clarifying the company’s goals and objectives will help employees understand what they’re working towards and why it’s important.
2. Provide Resources – Provide employees with the necessary tools and resources to enable them to think creatively and come up with innovative ideas. This can include access to research materials, training opportunities, and brainstorming sessions.
3. Encourage Risk-Taking – Be open to new ideas and don’t be afraid to take risks. Encourage employees to take calculated risks and be willing to make mistakes—it’s often through trial and error that the best ideas come about.
4. Reward Innovation – Recognize and celebrate employees who come up with innovative solutions. Not only will this motivate them, but it will also show other employees that the company values creative thinking.
5. Foster Collaboration – Encourage collaboration and open communication between teams. By bringing different perspectives together, teams can generate new ideas and find better solutions to problems.
Innovation is essential for any business looking to stay competitive and grow. By following these steps, businesses can create a culture of innovation and reap the rewards of a more creative and productive workforce.
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Change is inevitable, and successful change leadership is the key to ensuring that change is successful. Change leadership involves effectively managing the transition process that accompanies any change to ensure that the desired results are achieved. With the right leadership skills, you can make sure that the change you want to implement is successful.
Here are some secrets to effective change leadership:
1. Understand the process: To be an effective change leader, you need to understand the change process. A good change leader knows what needs to happen at each stage of the process and how to effectively move from one stage to the next.
2. Create a vision: It is essential to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve with the change. This vision should be communicated to everyone involved in the change process. It should include the desired outcomes, the timeline for implementation, and any resources required.
3. Communicate: Communication is essential for successful change. You need to communicate with everyone involved, from the stakeholders to the team members. Make sure that everyone understands the change and their role in it.
4. Manage resistance: Change can be difficult, and it’s important to be prepared for resistance. Don’t be afraid to confront resistance head-on. Address concerns and objections and use techniques such as negotiation and compromise to manage resistance.
5. Stay focused: As a change leader, it is essential to stay focused on the goal. Don’t get sidetracked by details or become overly analytical. Keep your focus on the vision and the desired outcomes.
6. Empower your team: It is important to empower your team to take ownership of the change process. Allow them to be creative and come up with solutions. Support them and provide them with the resources they need to be successful.
7. Monitor progress: As the change leader, it is important to monitor progress throughout the process. Make sure that the objectives are being achieved and that any issues are addressed quickly.
By following these secrets of change leadership, you can ensure that the change you want to implement is successful. With the right leadership skills and a positive attitude, you can make sure that the desired outcomes are achieved. It is the leader’s job to guide their team through changes, both big and small. However, fostering a culture of change leadership in an organization can be a challenge.
Here are a few tips on how to encourage and develop change leadership in your organization:
1. Establish Clear Goals
The first step in fostering a culture of change leadership is to ensure that your organization has clear goals and objectives. Leaders need to be able to communicate the vision of the organization and what it is trying to achieve. This gives team members direction and helps them understand the importance of change.
2. Encourage Open Dialogue
Leaders should create an open and honest dialogue with their team. This includes allowing team members to voice their ideas and opinions. It is important to create a safe space for team members to be able to express themselves without fear of judgement. This will help encourage creative thinking and allow for more innovative solutions to the organization’s challenges.
3. Lead by Example
It is important for leaders to lead by example when it comes to embracing change. Leaders should be willing to take risks and try out new ideas. This will show team members that it is okay to think outside the box and that failure is part of the process.
4. Provide Training and Development
Leaders should focus on providing training and development opportunities for their team. This can include workshops, seminars, and webinars, as well as one-on-one coaching. This will help team members to develop the skills needed to embrace change and become better change leaders.
5. Embrace Failure
Finally, it is important to remember that failure is part of the process. Leaders should not be afraid to fail and should instead use it as a learning opportunity. This will help create a culture where team members are not afraid to take risks and try new things.
Fostering a culture of change leadership in an organization is not easy, but it is an essential part of ensuring success. By following the tips above, you can help create an environment that encourages team members to be creative and embrace change.
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Excerpt from the May/June 2017 edition of The European Business Review
Every company begins as the nimble startup, organized around the solution to a single customer problem and executing that solution better than anyone else in the market (including incumbents with deep pockets). But this emerging leader soon becomes a follower as the organization evolves and scales into a more complex (but capable) next generation incumbent. Inevitably, every growing organization finds itself so focused on capturing all of the business for its existing solutions, that it finds itself becoming disconnected from evolving customer preferences.
The companies that last the longest manage to fulfill existing customer needs with well-delivered solutions, and identify new customer needs to satisfy as customer preferences continue to shift. But many large or growing companies fail to do so quickly enough, especially in our new digital reality where it is easier than ever to start and scale a solution around the globe with limited resources. Innovation is the key to remaining relevant with customers. Winning the War for Innovation is the key to remaining alive.
It is not too often that the leader of a Fortune 500 gives you an insight into how their company achieves competitive advantage in the marketplace in a letter to shareholders, instead of launching into a page or two of flowery prose written by the Public Relations (PR) team that works for them. The former is what Jeff Bezos tends to deliver year after year. This year’s letter is particularly interesting.
The two key insights in this year’s letter were that:
#1 – Amazon strives to view itself as a startup champion riding to the rescue of customers
#2 – Amazon chooses to be customer-obsessed, not customer-focused or customer-centric, but customer-obsessed
Both of these are crucial to sustaining innovation, and are supported by Jeff’s other main pieces of advice:
– Resisting proxies
– Embracing external trends
– Practicing high velocity decision making
But, I won’t steal Jeff’s thunder. I encourage you to read Jeff’s letter to shareholders in its entirety, check out the bonus video interview at the end, and add comments to share what you find particularly interesting in the letter.
Keep innovating!
—————————————————————- 2016 Letter to Amazon Shareholders
April 12, 2017
“Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?”
That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic.
“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.
I’m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization?
Such a question can’t have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.
True Customer Obsession
There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.
Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.
Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.
Resist Proxies
As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.
Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers – something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products. “Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. That is up from 47% in the first survey.” That’s hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead.
Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.
I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.
Embrace External Trends
The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.
These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We’re in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Over the past decades computers have broadly automated tasks that programmers could describe with clear rules and algorithms. Modern machine learning techniques now allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the precise rules is much harder.
At Amazon, we’ve been engaged in the practical application of machine learning for many years now. Some of this work is highly visible: our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones; the Amazon Go convenience store that uses machine vision to eliminate checkout lines; and Alexa, our cloud-based AI assistant. (We still struggle to keep Echo in stock, despite our best efforts. A high-quality problem, but a problem. We’re working on it.)
But much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. Though less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type – quietly but meaningfully improving core operations.
Inside AWS, we’re excited to lower the costs and barriers to machine learning and AI so organizations of all sizes can take advantage of these advanced techniques.
Using our pre-packaged versions of popular deep learning frameworks running on P2 compute instances (optimized for this workload), customers are already developing powerful systems ranging everywhere from early disease detection to increasing crop yields. And we’ve also made Amazon’s higher level services available in a convenient form. Amazon Lex (what’s inside Alexa), Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition remove the heavy lifting from natural language understanding, speech generation, and image analysis. They can be accessed with simple API calls – no machine learning expertise required. Watch this space. Much more to come.
High-Velocity Decision Making
Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business – plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too. We don’t know all the answers, but here are some thoughts.
First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you’re wrong? I wrote about this in more detail in last year’s letter.
Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.
This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.
Note what this example is not: it’s not me thinking to myself “well, these guys are wrong and missing the point, but this isn’t worth me chasing.” It’s a genuine disagreement of opinion, a candid expression of my view, a chance for the team to weigh my view, and a quick, sincere commitment to go their way. And given that this team has already brought home 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars, I’m just glad they let me in the room at all!
Fourth, recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.
I’ve seen many examples of sincere misalignment at Amazon over the years. When we decided to invite third party sellers to compete directly against us on our own product detail pages – that was a big one. Many smart, well-intentioned Amazonians were simply not at all aligned with the direction. The big decision set up hundreds of smaller decisions, many of which needed to be escalated to the senior team.
“You’ve worn me down” is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead – it’s better.
So, have you settled only for decision quality, or are you mindful of decision velocity too? Are the world’s trends tailwinds for you? Are you falling prey to proxies, or do they serve you? And most important of all, are you delighting customers? We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one. But we have to choose it.
A huge thank you to each and every customer for allowing us to serve you, to our shareowners for your support, and to Amazonians everywhere for your hard work, your ingenuity, and your passion.
As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. It remains Day 1.
Sincerely,
Jeff
———————————
If you’d like dive deeper into the mind of Jeff Bezos, then check out this interview with him conducted by Walt Mossberg of The Verge last year at Code Conference 2016:
And here is another fascinating peek inside the mind of Jeff Bezos from 1997:
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We have all been to many conferences, and heard many good (and bad) keynote and session speakers with a variety of styles (all of which are perfectly acceptable), including:
1. The Motivator
Say this public speaking style and most people will envision Bill Clinton, Tony Robbins, Steve Ballmer or someone like that. Notice that not all three examples are people you think of as full of boundless energy, that can be incredibly motivating. The motivator tries to connect on an emotional level with the audience and dial up the inspiration.
2. The Academic
This speaking style is nearly, but not completely synonymous with college professors and others in the “teaching” business. My personal style straddles between The Academic and The Storyteller. The Academic focuses on bringing compelling content and connecting with the intellect of the audience, bringing them tools and concepts that done well, are easy to grasp and use.
3. The Storyteller
The Storyteller makes a strong use of similes, metaphors, and stories to get their points across. Bill Clinton straddles the line between The Motivator and The Storyteller. Storytellers try to connect on an emotional level and along with The Academic, tend to dive deeper into their points than The Motivator or The Standup comedian. Personally I love good stories and funny pictures and so my personal T-shaped speaking style embraces bits of The Storyteller and The Standup Comedian as well.
4. The Standup Comedian
The Standup Comedian aims to keep the audience laughing, using humor to underscore and to make their points. Other than comedy writers or standup comedians, few speakers will rely on this as their primary style, but many will drift into this style from time to time.
As you might expect, all of these styles are perfectly valid as long as the content is solid and valuable, but the energy of The Motivator entices a lot of people and as you can imagine, this group does the most to both help and hurt people’s perceived value of keynote speakers. Sometimes The Motivator inspires people to action, and other times they are the equivalent of cotton candy, firing people up with weak content that they can’t do anything with.
So, if with public speaking, like other communication vehicles, content is king and all speaking styles are valid, then you need to find the right content, the right speaker, and have the right reasons for employing one.
With that in mind, let’s look at the…
Top 10 Reasons to Hire an Innovation Keynote Speaker
To begin an honest dialog around the role of innovation in your organization’s future
To bring additional perspectives to existing innovation conversations
To lay the groundwork for building an innovation infrastructure
To help reduce the fear of innovation in your organization
To reinforce your commitment to innovation publicly to your employees
To increase the energy for innovation in your company
To inject fresh life into an existing innovation program
To combine with an innovation workshop to build new innovation capabilities
Click the image to download as a PDF:
This is of course, not a comprehensive list of the reasons that companies around the world find value in periodically bringing in an innovation keynote speaker to dialog with their employees. Some companies choose to achieve some of these objectives via the innovation keynote, and others by sponsoring innovation training programs, or by retaining an innovation thought leader in an advisory capacity to provide the same kind of external perspectives, input, insights, and diversity of thought.
So, whether you are a new innovation leader seeking guidance on how to get off on the right foot, or an experienced Chief Innovation Officer, VP of Innovation, or Innovation Director, I encourage you to consider having myself or another innovation keynote speaker or workshop leader as a guest from time to time. I know you’ll find value in it!
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I was reading with interest some of Linkedin’s recent #HowIHire series and in doing so it was interesting to see how many people are still operating under the old, broken hiring paradigm when it comes to the labor market.
The best of the bunch that I read was Beth Comstock’s You’re Hired. Now What which has more to do with what she thinks people should do after she gives them a job rather than how she hires, which I thought was a good angle to take.
My day job was recently eliminated in a budget reallocation, so I’m out there in the market looking for my next new challenge. Throughout this process (and my consulting work over the years), I’ve observed a number of different challenges that companies face with hiring, and identified some opportunities for companies to increase their return on human capital:
Challenge #1:
Scanning resumes and online applications for keywords is a very bad way to find talent. It’s very good however at finding people who at least know how to spell the keywords.
Challenge #2:
The way most organizations handle human resources is very much a product of the industrial age. Hiring new employees is still a very bureaucratic affair, a far cry from reflecting an Internet Age approach, and farther still from what’s needed in the era of Social Business and Digital Transformation. Having an outdated, bureaucratic hiring approach prevents many organizations from growing (or changing) as fast as they may need to maximize revenue and profits.
Challenge #3:
Building on Challenge #2, the hiring process is incredibly slow. It can take weeks or months to finalize and post job descriptions. It can take weeks to source candidates. It can take weeks or months for a hiring manager to get around to interviewing anyone because they are too busy. This can result in the loss of the best candidates, can lead to the loss of current employees picking up the slack (leading to more job openings), and impacts the financial performance of the organization.
Challenge #4:
With the exception of professional sports franchises, companies are so risk averse that they would rather hire someone with a lot of experience doing something in a mediocre way than someone with limited experience but a higher upside (higher capacity and capability). Following this analogy, most companies would never have hired a high school kid like Lebron James.
Challenge #5:
Automated and recruiter-led screening systems are better at identifying people that fit the job description than they are at identifying people that will thrive in the company culture and be a productive team member. You can’t train people to be a good cultural fit, but you can train smart people to do just about anything.
Opportunity #1:
Every company whether it likes it or not, is a technology company. So, if you’re running a technology company, and ideally a social business, shouldn’t you want to hire people who know how to use technology (or at least how to build a Linkedin profile)? And if they have a Linkedin profile, why wouldn’t you use that instead of asking them to create another profile on your careers site?
Opportunity #2:
Things are changing at an increasing rate. Hire people who embrace change and like to learn, because you’re always going to be asking people to learn something new as the world continues to change around you.
Opportunity #3:
Looking around the landscape, it seems like we’ve created more ways to help people find the ideal new romantic partner than the ideal new employee. Are there things that the recruiting industry could learn for the romance industry?
Opportunity #4:
There is more to an employee than their intersection with the job description. In fact employees often have knowledge, skills and abilities that intersect with multiple job descriptions. Below you’ll find a visual depiction of this and of the increasingly less well-defined organizational boundaries:
Opportunity #5:
As the boundaries of the organization become less well-defined (see above) and as business makes increasing use of open innovation, partnerships, and co-opetition, hiring managers should consider not just matching the job description but also consider their ability to build and leverage external networks, and investigate the scope and quality of their existing networks.
Conclusion
Of course there are many more challenges and opportunities than I have space to list here, but I find these to be an interesting start to a conversation. What challenges or opportunities would you like to add to the conversation?
Image credit: businessnewsdaily.com
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Among my innovation peers, we have talked about how crucial executive commitment is, and some organizations have responded by hiring Innovation Managers, Innovation Directors, VP’s of Innovation, and Chief Innovation Officers (CINO’s not CIO’s so there is no confusion with Chief Information Officers).
One of the dangers of putting people in charge of innovation though, is that unless you carefully craft the positions and communicate their place and purpose across the organization, you can leave people feeling that innovation is not their job.
But, the reality is that everyone has a role to play in innovation, and in my five-star book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire (available at many local libraries) I outlined nine innovation roles that must me filled at the appropriate times for innovation to be successful. The Nine Innovation Roles include:
Revolutionary
Artist
Conscript
Connector
Troubleshooter
Customer Champion
Judge
Magic Maker
Evangelist
It is because everyone has a role to play in innovation, and because everyone is innovative in their own way, that installing a Chief Innovation Officer may not be the best idea.
Any time you put someone in charge of something at that level of the organization, you end up with someone who thinks they are in charge of the area, in control of innovation. And innovation is not something that you should seek to control, but instead to facilitate.
The idea that people are either innovative or not, and either possess the Innovator’s DNA or they don’t, is complete poppycock (feel free to insert a stronger or more colorful word if you’d like, but I’ll try and keep it PG – for now).
Is there is any type of work more in need of a servant leader than the innovation efforts of the company?
So, if you fire your Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) how are you going to make your organization more innovative?
The answer is to hire an Innovation Enablement Leader.
The implication is that this person’s job will be to lead not to manage, and to enable instead of control. The job of an Innovation Enablement Leader is to facilitate the Seven C’s of a Successful Innovation Culture (working title):
Cultivating a Culture of Curiosity
Collection of inspiration and insight
Connections
Creation
Collaboration
Commercialization
Communications
More on the details of the Seven C’s of a Successful Innovation Culture in a future article.
Responsibility for innovation should remain with the business, under an innovation vision, strategy and goals set by the CEO and senior leadership. The job of an Innovation Enablement Leader (or Innovation Facilitator) meanwhile is to serve the rest of the organization and to work across the organization to help remove barriers to innovation and to focus on the Seven C’s of a Successful Innovation Culture. This could also providing a set of tools and methodologies for creative problem solving and other aspects of innovation work, organizing events, and other activities that support deepening capabilities across the Seven C’s of Successful Innovation Culture.
Most organizations have innovated at least once in their existence, and in many organizations people are still innovating. A true Innovation Enablement Leader is more of a coach, supporting emergent innovation, and helping people test and learn, prototype and find the right channel to scale the most promising insight-driven ideas (or work with the organization to create new channels).
So, are you seeking to control innovation with a Chief Innovation Officer or to facilitate it with an Innovation Enablement Leader?
Keep innovating!
P.S. If you’re looking to hire an Innovation Enablement Leader, drop me an email.
Image credit: E Sotera (via interaction-design.org)
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It is not too often that the leader of a Fortune 500 gives you an insight into how their company achieves competitive advantage in the marketplace in a letter to shareholders, instead of launching into a page or two of flowery prose written by the Public Relations (PR) team that works for them. The former is what Jeff Bezos tends to deliver year after year. This year’s letter is particularly interesting.
I was reading with interest some of Linkedin’s recent #HowIHire series and in doing so it was interesting to see how many people are still operating under the old, broken hiring paradigm when it comes to the labor market.
