Category Archives: Leadership

How Ready Is Your Team for Change?

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

When we need to navigate through the complexities of organizational change, particularly in times like today where change is everywhere around us, we need a nuanced understanding of a team’s readiness for change and thus how it can enhance its resilience.

This ties into building a strategic approach to gauge, understand, and subsequently enhance this team readiness for change.

A Simple Exercise for Your Team Readiness

First, I would like to share a simpe exercise crafted to pragmatically assess your team’s preparedness and resilience in the face of change.

See the image and then embark on this reflective exercise, grading your team on a scale from 1 (low) to 6 (high) on these five questions.

Be mindful to approach this with candor as it will pave the way for tangible, beneficial insights.

1. Anticipation, Preparation:

1. How adept is your team at anticipating possible changes and preparing strategies and backup plans to manage them?

Adaptability, Role Flexibility:

2. How well does your team adjust its skills, knowledge, and alter roles and operations, to effectively implement new tools and methodologies during times of change?

Communication:

3. How effective, transparent, and consistent is the communication within your team during times of change?

Emotional Readiness:

4. To what extent does your team display emotional readiness and stability and what is the level of psychological safety during changes in the workplace?

Leadership During Change:

5. How effectively does the next level of leadership above your team guide, support, and provide clear directions during change processes, ensuring stability and clarity?

How well does your team score? Is change your worst enemy or you just great at dealing and growing with this?

Diving into the Elements

I added each component of this exercise to address key aspects of a team’s navigation through the terrains of change. Here’s why:

1. Anticipation, Preparation:

A cornerstone of resilient performance amidst change lies in anticipation and strategic preparation, ensuring the team can adeptly navigate through different scenarios, maintaining functionality and mitigating reactionary responses.

2. Adaptability, Role Flexibility:

Ensuring a team can modify its functions and shift roles, absorbing new methodologies, tools, and technologies during transitions, is vital for maintaining performance and productivity during upheavals.

3. Communication:

Transparency and consistency in communication form the bedrock of clarity and coordinated maneuvering during change, reducing anxiety and ensuring a unified team approach towards transitional phases.

4. Emotional Readiness:

A team that displays emotional stability and ensures a psychologically safe environment during change is poised to maintain morale and productivity, addressing and navigating through the emotional and psychological impacts of change.

5. Leadership During Change:

Leadership’s role in providing stability, direction, and support during change processes cannot be overstated, ensuring that the team can confidently navigate through alterations without feeling rudderless.

Final Thoughts

The components outlined in the exercise provide a foundational framework for understanding and enhancing a team’s readiness for change. However, it is imperative to acknowledge that change is multi-faceted and complex, demanding continuous, dynamic approaches to managing it effectively.

The simple exercise can help your team reflect on the important topic of change readiness and I hope that by coupling reflective assessments with strategic action, your team can not only navigate through the changes of today but also fortify itself for the uncertainties of tomorrow.

Ultimately, it is through understanding and addressing these elements that teams can truly become adept, resilient navigators of change.

Image Credit: Pexels

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Goals Are Not the Goal

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Goals Are Not the Goal

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

All goals are arbitrary, but some are more arbitrary than others.

When your company treats goals like they’re not arbitrary, welcome to the US industrial complex.

What happens if you meet your year-end goals in June? Can you take off the rest of the year?

What happens if at year-end you meet only your mid-year goals? Can you retroactively declare your goals unreasonable?

What happens if at the start of the year you declare your year-end goals are unreasonable? Can you really know they’re unreasonable?

You can’t know a project’s completion date before the project is defined. That’s a rule.

Why does the strategic planning process demand due dates for projects that are yet to be defined?

The ideal future state may be ideal, but it will never be real.

When the work hasn’t been done before, you can’t know when you’ll be done.

When you don’t know when the work will be done, any due date will do.

A project’s completion date should be governed by the work content, not someone’s year-end bonus.

Resources and progress are joined at the hip. You can’t have one without the other.

If you are responsible for the work, you should be responsible for setting the completion date.

Goals are real, but they’re not really real.

Image credit: Pixabay

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This One Word Will Transform Your Approach to Innovation

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GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Have you heard any of these sentences recently?

“We don’t have time”

“Our people don’t have the skills”

“We don’t have the budget”

“That’s not what we do”

I hear them all the time.

Sometimes they’re said when a company is starting to invest in building their innovation capabilities, sometimes during one-on-one stakeholder interviews when people feel freer to share their honest opinions, and sometimes well after investments are made.

Every single time, they are the beginning of the end for innovation.

But one word that can change that.

“We don’t have time – yet.”

“Our people don’t have the skills – yet.”

“We don’t have the budget – yet.”

“That’s not what we do – yet.”

Yet.

Yet creates space for change. It acknowledges that you’re in the middle of a journey, not the end. It encourages conversation.

“We don’t have time – yet.”

“OK, I know the team is busy and that what they’re working on is important. Let’s look at what people are working on and see if there are things we can delay or stop to create room for this.”

“Our people don’t have the skills – yet.”

“Understand, we’re all building new skills when it comes to innovation. Good news, skills can be learned. Let’s discuss what we need to teach people and the best way to do that.”

“We don’t have the budget – yet.”

“I get it. Things are tight. We know this is a priority so let’s look at the budget and see if there’s a way to free up some cash. If there’s not, then we’ll go back to leadership and ask for guidance.”

“That’s not what we do – yet.”

“I know. Remember, we’re not doing this on a whim, we’re doing this because (fill in reason), and we have a right to do it because of (fill in past success, current strength, or competitive advantage.”

You need to introduce the YET.

It is very rare for people to add “yet” to their statements. But you can.

When someone utters an innovation-killing statement, respond with “Yet.” Maybe smile mischievously and then repeat their statement with “yet” added to the end.

After all, you’re not disagreeing with them. You’re simply qualifying what they’re saying. Their statement is true now, but that doesn’t mean it will be true forever. By restating their assertion and adding “yet,” you’re inviting them to be part of the change, to take an active role in creating the new future state.

There’s a tremendous amount of research about the massive impact of this little word. It helps underperforming students overachieve and is closely associated with Dr. Carol Dweck’s research into fixed and learning mindsets.

The bottom line is that “YET” works.

Put YET to work for you, your organization, and your efforts to innovate and grow.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Trust is the Answer to Any Question

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Trust is the Answer to Any Question

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want to make a difference, build trust.

If you want to build trust, do a project together.

If you want to build more trust, help the team do work they think is impossible.

If you want to build more trust, contribute to the project in the background.

If you want to build more trust, actively give credit to others.

If you want to build more trust, deny your involvement.

If you want to create change, build trust.

If you want to build trust, be patient.

If you want to build more trust, be more patient.

If you want to build more trust, check your ego at the door so you can be even more patient.

If you want to have influence, build trust.

If you want to build trust, do something for others.

If you want to build more trust, do something for others that keeps them out of trouble.

If you want to build more trust, do something for others that comes at your expense.

If you want to build more trust, do it all behind the scenes.

If you want to build more trust, plead ignorance.

If you want the next project to be successful, build trust.

If you want to build trust, deliver what you promise.

If you want to build more trust, deliver more than you promise.

If you want to build more trust, deliver more than you promise and give the credit to others.

If you want deep friendships, build trust.

If you want to build trust, give reinforcing feedback.

If you want to build more trust, give reinforcing and correcting feedback in equal amounts.

If you want to build trust, give reinforcing feedback in public and correcting feedback in private.

If you want your work to have meaning, build trust.

Image credit: misterinnovation.com

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Five Simple Things Great Leaders Do

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Five Simple Things Great Leaders Do

GUEST POST from David Burkus

When you start out your career, you’re most often an individual contributor. And in that role your knowledge and skills are most important. But if you do that role well, you’ll likely be asked to consider becoming a leader. And in leadership, the methods you relied on to be a great employee don’t often help you become a great leader. Those skills will rarely help encourage and coach others to be great employees. Being a great leader requires a new toolkit.

As Marshall Goldsmith often says “What got you here, won’t get you there.”

In this article, we’ll discuss what will actually get you there. We’ll outline five ways to become a great leader —
whether it’s your first leadership role or your fiftieth.

1. Give Clear Expectations

The first way to become a great leader is to give clear expectations. In order to perform adequately (or higher), people need clarity. Teams need to know what’s expected of them, by when, and how they’re supposed to deliver it. And they need to know the priorities behind various tasks—what is most important, least important, and what’s in the middle. The challenge is that many leaders think that saying what they expect once is sufficient. And that might work in a static environment. But in a rapidly changing one, expectations and priorities can change quickly. So, leaders need to be clear about expectations and clear about when changes have happened and so expectations have also changed. And the same is true for priorities. It’s not enough for leaders to set expectations once, great leaders check-in constantly and revise their expectations accordingly.

2. Ask For Input

The second way to become a great leader is to ask for input. Often leaders can assume their primary job is solving problems and providing answers. They were promoted into a leadership role because of their outstanding knowledge and performance, and their team often comes to them with problems. So, their job must be to supply answers. Right? But great leaders don’t assume they have all the answers. Instead, they ask the team for input on nearly every decision of consequence. Great leaders know that doing so increases how much information will get captured and how many solutions will be generated. They also know that coming out of those requests for input will be team members who feel heard, and hence valued. And great leaders know that any suggestions they make can quickly be interpreted as orders—so they’re careful not to offer those suggestions until everyone has had a chance to be heard.

3. Share Your Reasoning

The third way to become a great leader is to share your reasoning. While great leaders seek out input from as many sources as possible, the final decision often rests on them. When that happens, great leaders know to share the reasoning behind their decision—not just the decision itself. Sharing the reasoning behind decisions is a way to reinforce the input that was considered before making the decision—which is especially helpful for those who may have desired a different decision. But sharing the reasoning also helps train the team on how their leader thinks—which is especially helpful when teams or team members bring their problems to the leader. Overtime, teaching team members to reason like their leader makes it more likely they’ll be able to solve the problem on their own next time. The more often leaders share their reasoning, the less often they’ll have to make a decision—because the team gets trained to reason the same way.

4. Stay Purpose Focused

The fourth way to become a great leader is to stay purpose focused. Great leaders keep the team focused on the mission, vision, and values of the organization but more importantly, how that specific team’s work helps serve that mission. It’s not enough for an organization to have a fancy vision or a compelling mission. Whether that mission actually motivates is determined at the team-level. That’s why great leaders know how to translate that larger mission into the day-to-day tasks of the team and bring meaning to the metrics the team is being assessed on. One of the most powerful ways leaders do this is by helping the team answer the question “Who is served by the work that we do?” and then build reminders to keep that answer top of mind. People want to do work that matters, and work for leaders who tell them they matter.

5. Care

The fifth way to become a great leader is to care. That’s the secret behind how great leaders tell their people they matter—those great leaders believe it. They genuinely care about the team they’re leading. They care enough to know about team members career desires and life goals, and they care enough to help each member fulfil those desires and goals in their work. Moreover, great leaders remind their people on a regular basis how much they care. The things leaders do to remind the team about its purpose are good, but the things they do to remind them they matter are great. And they can’t be faked. Great leaders genuinely care.

And even though it’s the fifth way, caring might be the most important one. You have to care for the people in your charge in order to put them first and serve them as a truly great leader. All the other ways will become easier if you start with caring. You’ll find you give clear expectation, ask for input, share your reasoning, and stay purpose focused. And over time you’ll find that caring, and employing all these methods, will help everyone on your team do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on April 17, 2023

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Thought Sparks – Episodic Innovation

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Raise the curtain on Innovation Theater yet again!

Episodic Innovation

GUEST POST from Rita McGrath

We know that to create meaningful innovations that can move the needle for the companies that sponsor them, attention, resources and commitment needs to be sustained. But in too many organizations, innovation gets started, gets some traction and – just at the brink of discovering something useful – gets cut. Welcome to the world of innovation theater.

Layoffs are in the air

Predictably, firms that spent like drunken sailors during the low-interest-rate free-for-all that we’ve just been through are now reconsidering their spending as the economy looks a little soft, inflation has become a thing and investors are asking for — egads — a route to profitability!

We have seen this movie before, and it is one of the most devastating patterns that afflicts internal corporate venturing, or ICV. It’s worth bringing back some original research by Stanford’s Robert Burgelman and his colleagues to understand it.

The mystery of corporate innovation cycles

Years, ago, Robert Burgelman and co-author Liisa Vilikangas came to a perplexing conclusion. Despite all the talk about innovation, all the energy and money thrown at it and all the noise about accelerators, studios and labs, companies find it extraordinarily difficult to stick to an innovation program.

Indeed, as they observe in this article, “many major corporations experience a strange cyclicality in their ICV (Internal Corporate Venturing) activity. Periods of intense ICV activity are followed by periods when such programs are shut down, only to be followed by new ICV initiatives a few years later. Like seasons, internal corporate venturing programs begin and end in a seemingly endless cycle.”

They identify two influences on how an innovation process can come to grief. The first predictor is how healthy the existing core business is in terms of growth prospects. The second is how much a company has in terms of uncommitted resources – whether that’s cash or people. What you get when you juxtapose the two is a lovely 2×2:

Corporate venturing orphans: With plentiful resources, people get resources to start new ventures, only to find that the core business is quite happy to ignore them. So, things get going, develop for a while, then wither on the vine as the core business essentially refuses to welcome them into the corporate fold.

The entrepreneurs behind such ventures either give up in frustration, leave to find a firm with a more welcoming environment or even leave to found a startup that might well compete with the original firm. The interesting story of how Zoom became Zoom is a case in point.

All-out venturing drives: In this situation, there is money to invest, company leadership knows it has a problem, and venturing becomes the holy grail. This can be useful, as it tends to raise the profile of the venturing activity and it finally attracts attention, talent and a seat at the table.

The dilemma is that senior leadership teams in a hurry are apt to put too much time pressure and expectations for rapid growth on a still-uncertain activity. This can cause them to lose faith in its prospects and terminate it before it even has a chance. IBM and Maersk’s effort to create a blockchain platform, TradeLens, feels like that to me. That venture also ignored Bent Flyvbjerg’s excellent advice to avoid complexity to the extent possible.

Venturing seems irrelevant: Here, money and talent is already committed to other things, and the core businesses’ chances are looking pretty good. So why bother with an uncertain, unproven, hard to predict new business activity when you can just ride the existing gravy train, probably for as long as is relevant for the career of a given senior leader?

What happens in this situation is that investments in new capabilities are ignored, and eventually competition catches up or makes your existing operations irrelevant. For instance, Carlson Travel was riding pretty high for a while, and evidently under-invested in technology. Carlson Travel implicitly acknowledged as it struggled through a bankruptcy that it had under-invested in its core digital technologies and customer experiences and promised to spent $100 million on getting up to speed.

Desperately Seeking Corporate Venturing! Ok, so we’ve left investing in the future too late, money is now tight, and we need to deliver something to our customers and investors PRONTO! These situations rarely end well. A desperate senior executive team might well enter into ill-considered acquisitions or now, belatedly, fund the one or two ideas that have survived being neglected.

These are often terrible ideas. See: checkered history of mainline telecom or cable companies entering the content business. AT&T’s misadventures with its forays into the media business are a case in point. Verizon’s as well. Desperation seldom leads to cool-headed deal-making or venturing. A rare exception took place at Xerox Parc, where the invention of the laser printer saved the company after the government forced it to essentially give away its patents to other firms.

It doesn’t have to be this way!

In the next Thought Spark, I’ll describe what we think about all this at Valize, my sister company whose mission is to create predictable and reliable innovation and growth capabilities. In the meantime, please stop pouring money into innovation theater!

Or if you are really itching to start an innovation or transformation program, mail us at growth@valize to set up a time. We can get you off on the right foot. After all, there are no standing ovations for innovation theater.

Image Credits: Unsplash, Pexels, MIT Sloan Review, www.collectivecamp.us

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Transformation is a Journey Not a Destination

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Transformation is a Journey Not a Destination

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When Mohandas Gandhi was a young lawyer he was so shy that he couldn’t even bring himself to speak in an open courtroom. He was also impulsive and had a nasty temper. Nelson Mandela started out as an angry nationalist, who argued vigorously about joining forces with other racial groups in a coalition to fight against Apartheid.

Yet as I explain in my book Cascades, both men learned to conquer themselves and evolved into inspirational leaders that achieved transformational change. Movements, as the name implies, must be kinetic to be successful. They need to start in one place and end up somewhere else, evolving and changing along the way.

The same is true for an organization. To create a real impact on the world, you first must drive change internally. That’s not easy and it doesn’t happen all at once, which is why most transformations fail. However, successful leaders understand that to bring true change about it is not enough to simply plan and direct action, you have to inspire and empower belief.

Building A Genome of Values

When Lou Gerstner took over as CEO of IBM in 1993, the company was near bankruptcy. Many thought it was a dinosaur and should be broken up. Yet Gerstner saw that its customers needed it to help them run their mission-critical systems and the death of IBM was the last thing they wanted. He knew that to save the company, he would have transform it and he started with its values.

“At IBM we had lost sight of our values,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of Gerstner’s chief lieutenants, told me. “IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition. Lou put a stop to that and even let go some senior executives who were known for infighting.”

Pushing top executives out the door is never easy. Most are hard working, ambitious and smart, which is how they got to be top executives in the first place. Yet sometimes you have to fire nasty people, even if they outwardly seem like good performers. That’s how you change the culture and build a collaborative workplace.

In doing so, Gerstner led one of the greatest turnarounds in corporate history. By the late 1990s, his company was thriving again and continues to be profitable to this day. That would have never been true if he saw the problem as one of merely strategy and tactics. IBM had to change from the inside first.

Forging Shared Purpose And Shared Consciousness

When General Stanley McChrystal first took over Special Forces in Iraq, he knew he had a magnificently engineered military machine. No force in the world could match their efficiency, expertise and effectiveness. Yet, although they were winning every battle, they were losing the war.

The problem, as he explained in his book, Team of Teams, wasn’t one of capability, but interoperability. His forces would kill or capture Al Qaeda operatives and collect valuable intelligence. Yet it often took weeks for the prisoners to be questioned and the data to be analyzed. By that time, the information was often no longer relevant or actionable.

What McChrystal realized was that if his forces were going to defeat a network, they had to become a network and he set out to build connections within his organization to improve trust and interoperability. He upgraded liaison officer positions to only include the best operators and embedded commandos into intelligence teams and vice versa.

While formal structure and traditional lines of authority stayed very much in place, operating principles changed markedly. The transformation wasn’t immediate, but soon personal relationships and shared purpose replaced archaic customs, procedures and internal rivalries. Even those resistant to change found themselves outnumbered and began to alter their views and behavior.

That allowed McChrystal to also change the way he led. While in traditional organizations information is passed up through the chain of command and decisions are made at the top, McChrystal saw that model could be flipped. Now, he helped information get to the right place and decisions could be made lower down. As a result, operating efficiency increased by a factor of seventeen and soon the terrorists were on the run.

Forging Cultural Awareness

As one of the largest credit bureaus in the world, Experian’s customers depend on it to help determine which customers are good risks and which aren’t. If its standards are too lax, lending organizations lose money from making bad loans. However, the opposite is also true. There are also consequences if it fails to identify good credit risks.

“One of the things that made the US so successful throughout its history is the principle that everybody can participate in the American dream,” Alexander Lintner, Group President at Experian told me. “Yet today, if you don’t have access to credit, it is very hard to live that dream. You can’t buy a house or a new car or do many other things most people want to do.”

“If we rely solely on traditional credit scores about 26 million working age adults are left out of the credit system,” he continued. “That means our clients are missing out on as many as 26 million potential customers. So at Experian, we’ve been working on extended scores based on alternative data, such as rent and utility bills, to help establish a credit history.”

As a fairly recent immigrant to the country, Lintner knows the problems that having a lack of a formal credit history can cause. He credits his company’s efforts to promote cultural awareness programs internally through Employee Resource Groups for driving a passion to solve problems for customers and the public at large, especially related to financial inclusion.

Transformation Starts At Home

Clearly, Experian didn’t start its Employee Resource Groups as a product development strategy, but to improve the lives of its employees. “We strive to make a very diverse group of people feel that Experian is their home,” Lintner says. Nevertheless, Its internal commitment helped create empathy for those who are excluded from the financial system and helped lead to a solution.

Chances are, that won’t end with using alternative data to improve credit scores, but will affect many other facets of its business. To drive a true desire to solve problems, it must be genuine. Much like Gandhi and Mandela, you have to first drive change internally if you hope to create a real impact on the world.

Wladawsky-Berger talks about IBM’s earlier transformation in similar terms. “Because the transformation was about values first and technology second, we were able to continue to embrace those values as the technology and marketplace continued to evolve,” he told me and credits that transformation in values with the company’s continued profitability. While IBM has had its challenges over the years, nobody talks about breaking it up anymore.

What most organizations fail to understand and internalize is that transformation is always a journey, never a destination. There is no immediate return on investment from cultural change. Investors won’t cheer you on for firing top employees who are disruptive or creating Employee Resource Groups. Yet great companies understand that transformation always starts at home.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credit: Pexels

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Big Companies Should Not Try to Act Like Startups

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Big Companies Should Not Try to Act Like Startups

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 2009, Jeffrey Immelt set out on a journey to transform his company, General Electric, into a 124 year old startup. Although it was one of the largest private organizations in the world, with 300,000 employees, he sought to become agile and nimble enough to compete with high-flying Silicon Valley firms.

It didn’t end well. In 2017, problems in the firm’s power division led to massive layoffs. Immelt was forced to step down as CEO and GE was kicked off the Dow after 110 years. The company, which was once famous for its sound management, saw its stock tank. Much like most startups, the effort had failed.

Somewhere along the line we got it into our heads that large firms can’t innovate and should strive to act like startups. The truth is that they are very different types of organizations and need to innovate differently. While large firms can’t move as fast as startups, they have other advantages. Rather than try to act like startups, they need to leverage what they have.

Driving Innovation At Scale

The aviation industry is dominated by big companies. With a typical airliner costing tens of millions of dollars, there’s not much room for rapid prototyping. It takes years to develop a new product and the industry, perhaps not surprisingly, moves slowly. Planes today look pretty much the same as ones made decades ago.

Looks, however, can be deceiving. To understand how the aviation industry innovates, consider the case of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. Although it may look like any other airplane, Boeing redesigned the materials within it. So a 787 is 20 percent lighter and 20 percent more efficient than similar models. That’s a significant achievement.

Developing advanced materials is not for the faint of heart. You can’t do it in a garage. You need deep scientific expertise, state-of-the-art facilities and the resources to work for years—and sometimes decades— to discover something useful. Only large enterprises can do that,

None of this means that startups don’t have a role to play. In fact one small company, Citrine Informatics, is applying artificial intelligence to materials discovery and revolutionizing the field. Still, to take on big projects that have the potential to make huge global impacts, you usually need a large enterprise.

Powering Startups

All too often, we see large enterprises and startups as opposite sides of the coin, with big companies representing the old guard and entrepreneurs representing the new wave, but that’s largely a myth. The truth is that innovation often works best when large firms and small firms are able to collaborate.

Scott Lenet, President of Touchdown Ventures, sees this first-hand every day. His company is somewhat unique in that, unlike most venture capital firms, it manages internal funds for large corporations. He’s found that large corporations are often seen as value added investors because of everything they bring to the table.

“For example,” he told me, “one of our corporate partners is Kellogg’s and they have enormous resources in technical expertise, distribution relationships and marketing acumen. The company has been in business for over 100 years and it’s learned quite a bit about the food business in that time. So that’s an enormous asset for a startup to draw on.”

He also points out that, while large firms tend to know how to do things well, they can’t match the entrepreneurial energy of someone striving to build their own business. “Startups thrive on new ideas,” Lenet says “and big firms know how to scale and improve those ideas. We’ve seen some of our investments really blossom based on that kind of partnership.”

Creating New Markets

Another role that large firms play is creating and scaling new markets. While small firms are often more agile, large companies have the clout and resources to scale and drive impact. That often also creates opportunities for entrepreneurs as well.

Consider the case of personal computers. By 1980, startups like Apple and Commodore had already been marketing personal computers for years, but it was mostly a cottage industry. When IBM launched the PC in 1981, however, the market exploded. Businesses could now buy a computer from a supplier that they knew and trusted.

It also created fantastic opportunities for companies like Microsoft, Intel and a whole range of entrepreneurs who flocked to create software and auxiliary devices for PCs. Later startups like Compaq and Dell created PC clones that were compatible with IBM products. The world was never the same after that.

Today, large enterprises like IBM, Google and Amazon dominate the market for artificial intelligence, but once again they are also creating fantastic opportunities for entrepreneurs. By accessing the tools that the tech giants have created through APIs, small firms can create amazing applications for their customers.

Innovation Needs Exploration

Clearly, large firms have significant advantages when it comes to innovation. They have resources, customer relationships and deep expertise to not only invent new things, but to scale businesses and bring products to market. Still, many fail to innovate effectively, which is why the average lifespan of companies on the S&P 500 continues to decline.

There’s no reason why that has to be true. The problem is that most large organizations spend so much time and effort fine-tuning their operations to meet earnings targets that they fail to look beyond their present business model. That’s not due to any inherent lack of capability, it’s due to a lack of imagination.

Make no mistake, if you don’t explore, you won’t discover. If you don’t discover you won’t invent and if you don’t invent you will be disrupted. So while you need to focus on the business at hand, you also need to leave some resources un-optimized so that you can identify and develop the next great opportunity.

A good rule of thumb to follow is 70-20-10. Focus 70% of your resources on developing your present business, 20% of your resources on opportunities adjacent to your current business, such as new markets and technologies and 10% on developing things that are completely new. That’s how you innovate for the long term.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credit: Pixabay

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The Dark Underbelly of Success

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The Dark Underbelly of Success

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Best practice – a tired recipe you recycle because you think the world is static.

Emergent practice – a new way to work created from whole cloth because the context is new.

Worst practice – a best practice applied to a world that has changed around you.

Novel practice– work that recognizes the world is a different place but is dismissed out-of-hand because everyone wants to live in the comfortable past.

Continuous improvement – when you try to put a shine on a tired, old process that worked ten years ago.

Discontinuous improvement – work that is disrespectful to the Status Quo and hurts people’s feelings.

Grow the core – when you do what you did in 2010 because you don’t know what else to do.

Obsolete your best work – when you do work that makes it clear to your customers that they should not have purchased your most successful product.

Reduce operating expense – what you do when you don’t know how to grow the top line and want to eliminate the flexibility to respond to an uncertain future.

Grow the top line – when you launch a new product that causes your customers to happily throw away the product they just bought from you.

A PowerPoint slide deck that defines your strategic plan – an electronic work product that distracts you from the reality of an ever-changing future.

A new product that is radically better than your last one – what you should create instead of a PowerPoint slide deck that defines your strategic plan.

MBA – a university degree that gives you a pedigree so companies hire you.

Ph.D. – a university degree that teaches you to learn, but takes too long.

Return On Investment (ROI) – a calculation that scuttles new work that would reinvent your business.

Imagination – thinking that will help you navigate an uncertain future, but is knee-capped by the ROI calculation.

Standard work – a process you used last time and will use next time because, again, you think the world is static.

Judgment – thinking that creates a whole new business trajectory to address an uncertain future but can get you fired if you use it.

A sustainable competitive advantage – a relic of a slow-moving world.

Continual change – the only way to deal with an ever-accelerating future.

Success – profits from work done by people who retired from your company some time ago.

Success – the thing that blocks you from working on the unproven.

Success – what pays the bills.

Success – what jeopardizes your ability to pay the bills in five years.

Success – why people think old practices are best practices.

Success – why new work is so difficult to do.

Success – why continuous improvement carries the day.

Success – why discontinuous improvement threatens.

Success – the mother of complacency.

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Innovation, change and transformation thought leadership, lovingly curated by Braden Kelley

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