Tag Archives: collaboration

Employees Are Calling BS on Customer-First Leadership

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

The data speaks for itself: Your employees don’t believe you practice customer-first leadership.

According to Gallup’s research, only one in five of your people think you make decisions with customers in mind. That means four out of five watch you say one thing and do another. Every. Single. Day.

And it’s getting worse. Fewer than three in ten of your employees feel proud of what they’re building for your customers. As a result, employee pride in what they create and deliver is at an all-time low.

You know what this means, don’t you? Your customer-first messaging isn’t inspiring anyone—it’s insulting them. Because they see the truth behind your town hall speeches, and the truth is that customers aren’t first.

How Are We Still Screwing This Up?

Customer-centricity has been business gospel for decades. We’ve got libraries full of case studies, armies of consultants, and enough “customer first” wall art to wallpaper the Apple HQ. So, how the hell are we getting worse at this?

Because most leaders treat customer focus like a box to check. They say the right words in town halls and analyst calls but make decisions that prioritize quarterly numbers, internal politics, and whatever shiny new idea they come up with.

Leaders say customers come first, then cut support staff to hit margins. They preach customer obsession, then ignore feedback that requires real change. They commission expensive customer journey maps, then never look at them again.

Employees see it all.

And when employees stop believing in what they deliver, customers know it immediately. Every burned-out support call, every half-hearted sales pitch, every policy that punishes the customer to boost the company’s profit.

You CAN do better

You only need to look as far as the telecom industry (?!?!?!) for an $800 million example.

In 2005, Arlene Harris co-founded GreatCall (now Lively) and did something radical: she built a company based on the Jobs to be Done of senior citizens. While everyone else chased flashy features for younger markets, she recognized that older Americans didn’t want a smartphone—they wanted a lifeline.

Harris delivered with the Jitterbug, a simple flip phone with giant buttons. But that was just the beginning. Focusing more on helping customers stay safe and connected than cool features for the tech geeks, she quickly built an ecosystem offering emergency response, health monitoring, 24/7 human support, and caregiver connectivity.

When Best Buy acquired GreatCall for $800 million in 2018, they weren’t buying a phone company. They were buying something rare: a trusted, high-value services company with intensely loyal customers.

Harris succeeded by doing precisely what the data shows most leaders aren’t doing: genuinely understanding and serving real customer needs.

WILL you do better?

Customer-first leadership isn’t a box to check. It’s basic leadership integrity. It’s the difference between meaning what you say and just saying what sounds good.

When four out of five of your employees don’t trust your customer commitment, the problem isn’t your strategy deck, digital transformation, or tariffs. The problem is you.

So here’s your moment of truth: When was the last time you listened to customer service calls? Not the sanitized highlights your team shows you—the raw, unfiltered frustration of someone who can’t get help. When did you last sit in a waiting room and watch how people navigate your system? Or stock a shelf and see what customers actually do?

If you can’t remember, that’s your answer. If you’ve never done it, that’s worse.

The question is: Will you keep performing customer-centricity, or start practicing it?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Values Determine Your Competitiveness

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Values Determine Your Competitiveness

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When Lou Gerstner was chosen to lead IBM in 1993, he was an unlikely revolutionary. A McKinsey consultant and then the successful CEO of RJR Nabisco, he was considered to be a pillar of the establishment. He would, however, turn out to be as subversive as any activist, transforming the company and saving it from near-death.

Yet there was more to what he achieved than simply turning red ink to black. “The Gerstner revolution wasn’t about technology or strategy, it was about transforming our values and our culture to be in greater harmony with the market,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of his chief lieutenants, told me.

Values are essential to how an enterprise honors its mission. They represent choices of what an organization will and will not do, what it rewards and what it punishes and how it defines success and failure. Perhaps most importantly, values will determine an enterprise’s relationships with other stakeholders, how it collaborates and what it can achieve.

Values Incur Costs And Constraints

At his very first press conference, Gerstner famously declared: “the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” It was an odd, even shocking statement for a new CEO charged with turning around a historic company. But what he understood, and few others did, was that unless he changed the culture to honor the values its success was built on, no strategy could succeed.

“At IBM we had lost sight of our values,” Wladawsky-Berger would later tell me. “For example, there was a long tradition of IBM executives dressing formally in a suit and tie. Yet that wasn’t a value, it was an early manifestation of a value. In the early days, many of IBM’s customers were banks, so IBM’s salespeople dressed to reflect their customers. So the value was to be close to customers.”

Gerstner had been a customer and knew that IBM did not always treat him well. At one point the company threatened to pull service from an entire data center because a single piece of competitive equipment was installed. So as CEO, he vowed to shift the focus from IBM’s “own “proprietary stack of technologies” to its customers’ “stack of business processes.”

Yet he did something else as well. He made it clear that he was willing to forego revenue on every sale to do what was right for the customer and he showed that he meant it. Over the years I’ve spoken to dozens of IBM executives from that period and virtually all of them have pointed this out. Not one seems to think IBM would still be in business today without it.

The truth is that if you’re not willing to incur costs and constraints, it’s not a value. It’s a platitude. “Lou refocused us all on customers and listening to what they wanted and he did it by example,” Wladawsky-Berger, remembers. “We started listening to customers more because he listened to customers.

Values Signal Trust And Credibility

In South Africa, the Congress of The People was held in June, 1955. The gathering, which included blacks, mixed race, Indians and liberal whites, convened to draft and adopt the Freedom Charter, much like the Continental Congress gathered to produce the Declaration of Independence in America. The idea was to come up with a common and inclusive vision.

However, the Freedom Charter was anything but moderate. It was a “revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisioned could not be achieved without radically altering the economic and political structure of South Africa… In South Africa, to merely achieve fairness, one had to destroy apartheid itself, for it was the very embodiment of injustice,” Nelson Mandela would later write.

Yet despite its seemingly radical aims, the Freedom Charter spoke to common values, such as equal rights and equal protection under the law—not just among the signatories, but for anyone living in a free society. It was powerful because of how it signaled to outside stakeholders, such as international institutions, governments and corporations that they shared more with the anti-apartheid movement than they did with the regime.

It was because of those values that activists were able to successfully boycott firms, such as Barclays Bank and Shell Oil, that did business in South Africa. When those companies pulled their investments out, the dominoes began to fall. International sanctions and political pressure increased markedly and Apartheid became politically untenable.

Here again, values would play a crucial role. Much like Gerstner’s willingness to lose revenue on every sale to keep his commitment to IBM customers, Mandela’s commitment to the Freedom Charter, even during 27 years in prison, signaled to stakeholders—inside and outside of South Africa—that supporting his cause was the right thing to do.

Shared Values Drive Collaboration

In the 1960s and 70s, Route 128 outside of Boston was the center of technology, but by the 1990s Silicon Valley had taken over and never looked back. As AnnaLee Saxenian explained in her classic, Regional Advantage, the key difference had less to do with strategy, technology and tactics than it did with values and how the firms saw themselves.

Dominant Boston firms such as DEC, Data General and Wang Laboratories saw themselves as warring fiefdoms. The west coast startups, however, saw themselves as part of the same ecosystem and tended to band together and socialize. “Everybody worked for the same company — Silicon Valley,” Saxenian would later tell me.

This difference in values translated directly into differences in operational practice. For example, in Silicon Valley if you left your employer to start a company of your own, you were still considered part of the family. Many new entrepreneurs became suppliers or customers to their former employers and still socialized actively with their former colleagues. In Boston, if you left your firm you were treated as a pariah and an outcast.

When technology began to shift in the 80s and 90s, the Boston firms had little, if any, connection to the new ecosystems that were evolving. In Silicon Valley, however, connections to former employees acted as an antenna network, providing early market intelligence that helped those companies adapt.

When you value competition above all else, everyone is a potential enemy. However, when you are willing to forsake absolute fealty in the service of collaboration, you can leverage the assets of an entire ecosystem. Those may not show up on a strategic plan or a balance sheet, but they are just as important as any other asset.

Moving From Hierarchies to Networks

The truth is that IBM was not devoid of values when Gerstner arrived. It’s just that they’d gone awry. “IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition,” Wladawsky-Berger remembers. Certainly it valued technology and profits, just not customers.

What Gerstner did was, as noted above, bring the company’s culture and values back into “harmony with the market.” The company no longer wielded monopoly-like power. It had to collaborate with a wide array of stakeholders. It was this realization that led it to become the first major technology company to embrace open source software and support Linux.

Traditionally we’ve seen the world as driven by hierarchies. Kings and queens ruled the world through aristocracies that carried out their orders. Corporate CEO’s outlined strategies that underlings would have to execute. Discipline was enforced through a system of punishments and rewards. Power was valued above all else.

Yet as Moisés Naím pointed out in The End of Power, “Power is easier to get, but harder to use or keep.” Therefore, the ability to attract has become more important than the power to compel or coerce. That’s why today, strategy has less to do with increasing efficiencies and acquiring resources and more to do with widening and deepening networks of connections.

Power no longer lies at the top of hierarchies, but emanates from the center of networks. What determines whether we will get there or not is our values.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

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Five Questions to Liz Wiseman

Building Transformation Momentum from the Middle

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Conventional wisdom tells us that transformation flows from the C-suite down because real change requires executive mandates and company-wide rollouts. But what if our focus on building transformation momentum is exactly backward?

Ever since reading Multipliers, where Liz Wiseman revealed how the best leaders amplify their people rather than diminish them, I’ve wondered if, like innovation, organizational transformation and change also require us to do the opposite of our instincts.

I recently had the opportunity to dig deeper into this topic with her, and I couldn’t resist exploring how change really happens in large organizations.

What emerged wasn’t another framework—it was something more brilliant and subversive: how middle managers quietly become change agents, why sustainable transformation looks nothing like a launch event, and the liberating truth that leaders don’t need to be perfect.

Robyn Bolton: What’s the one piece of conventional wisdom about leading change that you believe organizations need to unlearn?

Lize Wiseman

Lize Wiseman: I don’t believe that change needs to start, or even be sponsored, at the top of the organization. I’ve seen so much change led from the middle management ranks. When middle managers experiment with new mindsets and practices inside their organizations, they produce pockets of success—anomalies that catch the attention of senior executives and corporate staffers who are highly adept at detecting variances (both negative and positive). When senior executives notice positive outcomes, they are quick to elevate and endorse the new practices, in turn spreading the practices to other parts of the organization. In other words, most senior executives are adept at spotting a parade and getting in front of it! (Incidentally, this is one of several executive skills you won’t find documented on any official leadership competency model.) If you don’t yet have the political capital to lead a company-wide initiative, run a pilot with a few rising middle managers. Shine a spotlight on their success and let the practices spread to their peers. Expose their good work to the executive team and make yourself available to turn the parade into a movement.

RB: In your research and work, what’s the most surprising pattern you’ve observed about successful organizational transformation?”

LW: As mentioned above, I believe the starting point for transformation is less important than how you will sustain the momentum you’ve generated. Unfortunately, most new initiatives—be they corporate change initiatives or personal improvement plans—begin with a bang but fizzle out in what I call “the failure to launch” cycle. Transformation that is sustained over time usually starts small and builds a series of successive wins. Each win provides the energy needed to carry the work into the next phase. These series of wins generate the energy and collective will needed to complete the cycle of success. As that cycle spins, nascent beliefs become more deeply entrenched and old survival strategies get supplanted by new methods to not just survive but thrive inside the organization.

Each little success requires careful support and an evidence-backed PR campaign to build awareness and broad support for the new direction. Nascent behavior and beliefs are fragile and will be overpowered by older assumptions until they are strengthened by supporting evidence. The supporting evidence forms a buttress around the budding mindset or practices, much like a brace around a sapling provides stability until the tree is strong enough to stand on its own.

RB: How has your thinking about what makes an effective leader evolved over the course of your career?

LW: When I began researching good leadership, most diminishing leaders appeared to be tyrannical, narcissistic bullies. But as I further studied the problem, I’ve come to see that the vast majority of the diminishing happening inside our workplaces is done with the best of intentions, by what I call the Accidental Diminisher—good people trying to be good managers. I’ve become less interested in knowing who is a Diminisher and much more interested in understanding what provokes the Diminisher tendencies that lurk inside each of us.

RB: When you consider all the organizations you’ve studied, what’s the most powerful lesson about driving meaningful change that most leaders overlook?

LW: One of the dangers of trying to lead change from the top is that most leaders have a hard time being a constant role model for the changes they advocate for. Even the best leaders can’t always display the positive behaviors they espouse and ask their organizations to embody. It’s human to slip up. But when behavior change is led primarily from the top, these all-too-natural slip-ups can become major setbacks for the whole organization because they provide visible evidence that the new behavior isn’t required or feasible, and followers can easily give up. Wise leaders understand this dynamic and build a hypocrisy factor into their change plans–meaning, they acknowledge upfront that they aspire to the new behavior but don’t always fully embody it, yet. They set the expectation that there will be setbacks and invite people to help them be better leaders as well. They acknowledge that the route to new behavior typically looks like the acclimation process used by high-elevation climbers. These climbers spend some of their days in ascent, but once they reach new elevations, often have to descend to lower camps to acclimate. It’s the proverbial two-steps-forward, one-step-back process. When leaders acknowledge their shortcomings and the likelihood of their future missteps, they not only minimize the chance that others give up when they see hypocrisy above them, but they create space for others to make and recover from their own mistakes.

RB: Looking ahead, what do you believe is the most important capability leaders need to develop to help their organizations thrive?

LW: Leading in uncertainty, specifically the ability to lead people to destinations that they themselves have never been.

I love that Liz’s insights flip the script, calling on people outside the C-Suite to stop waiting for permission and start running quiet experiments, building proof points, and letting success do the selling.

The next time you want a change or have change thrust upon you, don’t look for a parade to lead. Look for one person willing to try something different and get to work.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Making People Matter in AI Era

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Making People Matter in AI Era

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

People matter more than ever as we witness one of the most significant technological advancements reshaping humanity. Regardless of size, every industry and organization can adopt AI to enhance operations, innovate, stay competitive, and grow by partnering AI with people. Our research highlights three workplace trends and four global, strategic, and systemic human crises that affect the successful execution of all organizational transformation initiatives, posing potential barriers to implementing AI strategies. This makes the importance of people mattering in the age of AI greater than ever.

Three Key Global Trends

According to Udemy’s 2024 Global Learning and Skills Trends Report, three key trends are core to the future of work, stating that organizations and their leaders must:

Understand how to navigate the skills landscape and why it is essential to assess, identify, develop, and validate the skills their teams possess, lack, and require to remain innovative and competitive.
Adapt to the rise of AI, focusing on how generative AI and automation disrupt our work processes and their role in supporting a shift to a skills-based approach.
Develop strong leaders who can guide their teams through change and foster resilience within them.

Five Key Global Crises

1. Organizational engagement is in crisis.

Recently, Gallup reported that Global employee engagement fell by two percentage points in 2024, only the second time it has fallen in the past 12 years. Managers (particularly young managers and female managers) experienced the sharpest decline. Employee engagement significantly influences economic output; Gallup estimates that a two-point drop in engagement costs the world $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024.

2. People are burning out, causing a crisis in well-being.

In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Three dimensions characterize it:

Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
Reduced professional efficacy.

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”

They estimate that globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety, costing US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

Burnout is more than just an employee problem; it’s an organizational issue that requires a comprehensive solution. People’s mental and emotional health and well-being are still not prioritized or managed effectively. Well-being in the workplace is a complex systemic issue that must be addressed. Making people matter in the age of AI involves empowering, enabling, and equipping them to focus on developing their self-regulation and self-management skills, shifting them from languishing in a constant state of emotional overwhelm and cognitive overload that leads to burnout.

3. The attention economy is putting people into crisis.

According to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book, “Stolen Focus,” people’s focus and attention have been stolen; our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we must intentionally reclaim it. His book describes the wide range of consequences that losing focus and attention has on our lives. These issues are further impacted by the pervasive and addictive technology we are compelled to use in our virtual world, exacerbated by the legacy of the global pandemic and the ongoing necessity for many people to work virtually from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate. He suggests that to regain your ability to focus, you should stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Yet, in the Thesaurus, there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as listen and give heed.

4. Organizational performance is in crisis.

Research at BetterUp Labs analyzed behavioral data from 410,000 employees (2019-2025), linking real-world performance with organizational outcomes and psychological drivers. It reveals that performance isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about shifting fluidity between three performance modes – basic: the legacy from the industrial age, collaborative: the imperative of knowledge work, and adaptive: the core requirement to perform effectively in the face of technological disruption, by being agile, creative, and connected. The right human fuel powers these: motivation, optimism and agency, which our research has found to be in short supply and BetterUp states is running dry.

Data scientists at BetterUp uncovered that performance has declined by 2-6% across industries since 2019. In business terms, half of today’s workforce would land in a lower performance tier, across all three modes, by 2019 standards.

GenAI relies on activating all three performance gears, and the rise of AI-powered agents is reshaping the way teams work together. Research reveals that companies that invest in adaptive performance see up to 37% higher innovation.

5. Innovation is in crisis.

According to the Boston Consulting Group’s “Most Innovative Companies 2024 Report,” Innovation Systems Need a Reboot:

“Companies have never placed a higher priority on innovation—yet they have never been as unready to deliver on their innovation aspirations”

Their annual survey of global innovators finds that the pandemic, a shifting macroeconomic climate, and rising geopolitical tensions have all taken a toll on the innovation discipline. With high uncertainty, leaders shifted from medium-term advantage and value creation to short-term agility. In that environment, the systems guiding innovation activities and channeling innovation investments suffered, leaving organizations less equipped for the race to come. In particular, as measured by BCG’s proprietary innovation maturity score, innovation readiness is down across the elements of the innovation system that align with the corporate value creation agenda.

You can overcome these crises by transforming them into opportunities through a continuous learning platform that empowers, enables, and equips people to innovate today, making people matter in the age of AI. This will help develop new ways of shaping tomorrow while serving natural, social, and human capital, as well as humanity.

Current constraints of AI mean developing crucial human skills

While AI can perform many tasks, it cannot yet understand and respond to human emotions, build meaningful relationships, exhibit curiosity, or solve problems creatively.

This is why making people matter in the age of AI is crucial, as their human skills are essential.

Some of the most critical human skills are illustrated below.

Some of the Most Critical Human Skills

These essential human skills are challenging to learn and require time, repetition, and practice to develop; however, they are fundamental for creating practical solutions to address the three trends and four crises mentioned above.

Making people matter in the age of AI involves:

Providing individuals with the ‘chance to’ self-regulate their reactive responses by fostering self and systemic awareness and agility to flow with change and disruption in an increasingly uncertain, volatile, ambiguous, and complex world.
Inspiring and motivating people to ‘want to’ self-manage and develop their authentic presence and learning processes to be visionary and purposeful in adapting, innovating, and growing through disruption.
Teaching people ‘how to’ develop the states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills that foster discomfort resilience, adaptive and creative thinking, problem-solving, purpose and vision, conflict negotiation, and innovation.

Human Skills Matter More Than Ever

The human element is critical to shaping the future of work, collaboration, and growth. The most effective AI outcomes will likely come from human-AI partnership, not from automation alone. Making people matter in the age of AI is crucial as part of the adoption journey, and partnering them with AI can turn their fears into curiosity, re-engage them purposefully and meaningfully, and enable them to contribute more to a team or organization. This, in turn, allows them to improve their well-being, maintain attention, innovate, and enhance their performance. Still, it cannot do this for them.

Making people matter in the age of AI by investing in continuous learning tools that develop their human skills will empower them to adapt, learn, grow, and take initiative. External support from a coach or mentor can enhance support, alleviate stress, boost performance, and improve work-life balance and satisfaction.

Human problems require human solutions.

Our human skills are irreplaceable in making real-world decisions and solving complex problems. AI cannot align fragmented and dysfunctional teams, repair broken processes, or address outdated governance. These are human problems requiring human solutions. That’s where human curiosity and inspiration define what AI can never achieve. It is not yet possible to connect people, through AI, to what wants to emerge in the future.

Making people matter in the age of AI can ignite our human inspiration, empowering, engaging, and enabling individuals to unleash their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation. We can then harness people’s collective intelligence and technological expertise to create, adapt, grow, and innovate in ways that enhance people’s lives, which are deeply appreciated and cherished.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack . It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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Why Business Transformations Fail

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(and What Data Centers Can Teach Us About Getting Them Right)

Why Business Transformations Fail - Pexels

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

On May 6, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott joined CNBC’s “Power Lunch” to discuss the companies’ partnership. But something that Huang said about large-scale cloud service providers (i.e., hyperscalers) at the end of the interview stopped me in my tracks:

It’s not a data center that stores information. It’s a factory that produces intelligence. And these intelligence tokens could be reformulated into music, images, words, avatars, recommendations of music, movies, or, you know, supply chain optimization techniques.

What struck me wasn’t the claim about what data centers and AI could create — we’ve seen evidence of that already. It was the re-framing of data centers from storage solutions to “intelligence factories.”

When leaders fail to lead, or even recognize that the business they’re in is different, even the best efforts at business transformation are doomed.

Because re-framing is how Disruption begins.

Data Centers Are No Longer in the Data Business

Repositioning your company to serve a new job requires rethinking, redesigning, and rebuilding everything.

Consider the old adage that railroads failed because they thought they were in the railroad business. By defining themselves by their offering (railroad transportation) rather than the Jobs to be Done they solve (move people and cargo from A to B), railroads struggled to adapt as automobiles became common and infrastructure investments shifted from railroads to highways.

Data centers have similarly defined themselves by their offering (data storage). However, Huang’s reframing signals a critical shift in thinking about the Jobs that data centers solve: “provide intelligence when I need it” and “create X using this intelligence.”

Intelligence Factories Require a New Business Model

This shift—from providing infrastructure for storing data to producing intelligence, strategic analysis, and creative output—will impact business models dramatically.

Current pricing models based on power consumption or physical space will fail to capture the full value created. Capabilities mustexpand beyond building infrastructure to include machine learning and AI partnerships.

But Intelligence Factories are Just the Beginning

While Intelligence Factories will require data centers to rethink their business models and may even introduce a new basis of competition (a requirement for Disruption), they’re only a stepping-stone to something far more disruptive: Dream Factories.

While the term “Dream Factory” was coined to describe movie studios during Golden Era, the phrase is starting to be used to describe the next iteration of data centers and AI. Today’s AI is limited to existing data and machine learning capabilities, but we’re approaching the day when it can create wholly new music, images, words, avatars, recommendations, and optimization techniques.

This Is Happening to Your Business, Too

This progression will transform industries far beyond technology. Here’s what the evolution from data storage to Intelligence Factory to Dream Factory could look like for you:

Healthcare: From storing medical records to diagnosing conditions to creating novel treatments
Financial Services: From tracking transactions to predicting market movements to designing new financial instruments
Manufacturing: From inventory management to process optimization to inventing new materials
Retail: From cataloging products to personalizing recommendations to generating products that don’t yet exist

How to prepare for your Dream Factory Era

Ask yourself and your team these three questions:

Is my company defining itself by what it produces today or by the evolving needs it serves?
What is our industry’s version of the shift from data storage to dream factory?
What happens to our competitive advantage if someone else creates our industry’s dream factory before we do?

If you’re serious about transformation, take a cue from the data centers: redefine what business you’re in—before someone else does.

After all, the key to success isn’t trying to stay a data center. It’s recognizing you’ve become an intelligence factory, and your long-term success depends on becoming a dream factory.

Image credit: Pexels

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Innovation, Leadership and Productive Conflict

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Five Questions to Laura Weiss

Innovation, Leadership and Productive Conflict

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You need friction to create fire. It’s true whether you’re camping or leading change inside an organization. Yet most of us avoid conflict—we ignore it, smooth it over, or sideline the people who spark it.

I’ve been guilty of that too, which is why I was eager to sit down with Laura Weiss, founder of Design Diplomacy, former architect and IDEO partner, university educator, and professional mediator, to explore why conflict isn’t the enemy of innovation, but one of its essential ingredients.

Our conversation wasn’t about frameworks or facilitation tricks. It was about something deeper: how leaders can unlearn their fear of conflict, lean into discomfort, and use it to build trust, fuel learning, and drive meaningful change.

So if conflict feels like a threat to alignment and progress, this conversation will show you why embracing it is the real leadership move.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Robyn Bolton: What’s the one piece of conventional wisdom about change that organizations need to unlearn?

Laura Weiss: The belief that change is event-driven. It’s not, except for seismic shifts like the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, 9/11, and October 7. It’s happening all the time! As a result, leading change should be seen as a continuous endeavor that prepares the organization to be agile when unforeseen events occur.

RB: Wow, that is capital-T True! What is driving this misperception?

LW: It’s been said that ‘managers deal with complexity, but leaders deal with change’. So, it all comes down to leadership. However, the prevailing belief is that a “leader” is the person who has risen to the top of the organization and has all the answers.

In many design professions, those who are promoted to leadership roles are exceptional at their craft. But evolving from an ‘individual contributor’ to leading others involves skills that can seem contrary to our beliefs about leadership. One is humility – the capability to say “I don’t know” without feeling exposed as a fraud, especially in professions where being a “subject matter expert” is expected. Being humble presents the leader as human, which leads to another skill: connecting with others as humans before attempting to ‘lead’ them. I particularly like Edgar Schein’s relationship-driven leadership philosophy as opposed to ‘transactional’ leadership, where your role relative to others dictates how you interact.

RB: From your experience, how can we unlearn this and lead differently?

LW: Leaders need to do three things:

Be self-aware. After becoming a certified coach, it became clear to me that all leadership begins with understanding oneself. If you’re unaware of how you operate in the world, you certainly can’t lead others effectively.
Be agile. Machiavelli famously asked: “Is it better to be loved or feared…?” Being a leader requires the ability to do both, operating along the ‘warmth-strength’ continuum, starting with warmth. There are six leadership styles a leader should be familiar with, in the same way that golfers know which golf club to use for a particular situation.
Evolve. This means feedback – being willing to ask for it and receive it. Many senior leaders stop receiving feedback as they progress in their careers. But times change, and ‘what got you here won’t get you there.’ Holding up a mirror to very senior leaders who have rarely, if ever, received feedback, or have received it but didn’t really “get it,” is critical if they are to change with the times and the needs of their organization.

RB: Amen! I’m starting to sense a connection between leadership, innovation, and change, but before I make assumptions, what do you see?

LW: First, I want to acknowledge the thesis of your book that “innovation isn’t an idea problem, it’s a leadership problem” – 1000% agree with that!

One of the reasons I shifted from being an architect to focusing on the broader world of innovation was that I was curious about why some innovation initiatives were successful and some were not. Specifically, I was curious about the role of conflict in the creative problem-solving process because conflict is critical to bringing innovation and change to life. Yet, it’s not something most of us are naturally good at – in fact, our brain is designed to avoid it!

The biggest myth about conflict is that it erodes trust and undermines relationships. The opposite is true – when handled well, productive conflict strengthens relationships and leads to better outcomes for organizations navigating change.

Just as with innovation, the organizations that are most successful with change are the ones that consistently use productive conflict as an enabler of change.

To achieve this, organizations must shift from a reactive stance to a proactive one and become more “discovery-driven”. This means practicing iterative prototyping and learning their way forward. In my mind, innovation is a form of structured learning that yields something new with value.

RB: What role does communication play in leadership and conflict?

LW: Conflict is an inevitable part of the human experience because it reflects the tension between the status quo and something else that’s trying to emerge. It can appear even in the process of solving daily problems, so the ability to deal productively with conflict, from simple misunderstandings to seemingly intractable differences, is crucial.

The source code for effective conflict engagement is effective conversations.

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The real challenge in leadership isn’t preventing conflict—it’s recognizing that conflict is already happening and choosing to engage with it productively through conversation

This conversation with Laura reminded me that innovation and change don’t just thrive on new ideas. They require leaders who are self-aware enough to listen, humble enough to ask for feedback, and courageous enough to stay in the tension long enough for something better to emerge.

Image credit: Unsplash, Laura Weiss

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Transform Your Innovation Approach with One Word

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Transform Your Innovation Approach with One Word

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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Building Innovation Momentum Without the Struggle

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Five Questions for Tendayi Viki

Building Innovation Momentum Without the Struggle

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Innovation efforts get stuck long before they scale because innovation isn’t an idea problem. It’s a leadership problem. And one of those problems is that leaders are expected to spark transformation, without rocking the boat.

I’ve spent my career in corporate innovation (and wrote a book about it), so I was thrilled to sit down with Tendayi Viki, author of Pirates in the Navy and one of the most thoughtful voices on corporate innovation.

Our conversation didn’t follow the usual playbook about frameworks and metrics. Instead, it surfaced something deeper: how small wins, earned trust, and emotional intelligence quietly power real change.

If you’re tasked with driving innovation inside a large organization—or supporting the people who are—this conversation will challenge what you think it takes to succeed.

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Robyn Bolton (RB): You work with a lot of corporate leaders. What’s one piece of conventional wisdom they need to unlearn about innovation?

Tendayi Viki (TV): That you need to start with a big bang. That transformation only works if it launches with maximum support and visibility from day one.

But we don’t think that way about launching new products. We talk about starting with early adopters. Steve Blank even outlines five traits of early evangelists: they know they have the problem, they care about solving it, they’re actively searching for a solution, they’ve tried to fix it themselves, and they have budget. That’s where momentum comes from.

But in corporate settings, I see leaders trying to roll out transformation as if it is a company-wide software update. I once worked with someone in South Africa who was introduced as the new head of innovation at a big all-hands event. He told me later, “I wish I hadn’t started with such a big bang. It created resentment—I hadn’t even built a track record yet.”

Instead of struggling and pushing change on people, I try to help leaders build momentum. Think of it like a flywheel. You start slow, with the right people, at the right points of leverage. You work with early adopter leaders, tell stories about their wins, invite others to join. Soon, you’re not persuading anyone—you’ve got movement.

RB: Have you seen that kind of momentum work in practice?

TV: A few great examples stand out.

Claudia Kotchka at P&G didn’t go around talking about design thinking when she started. She picked a struggling brand and applied the tools there. Once that project succeeded, people paid attention. More leaders asked for help. That success did the selling.

And there’s a story from Samsung that stuck with me. A transformation team was tasked with leading “big innovation,” but they didn’t start by preaching theory. They said, “Let’s help senior leaders solve the problems they’re dealing with right now.” Not future-state stuff—just practical challenges. They built credibility by delivering value, not running roadshows.

If you can’t find early adopters, then take one step back. Solve someone’s actual problem. People are always fans of solving their own problems.

RB: When you think about leaders who are good at building momentum, what qualities or mindsets do they tend to have?

TV: Patience is huge. This stuff takes time. And you have to set expectations with the people who gave you the mandate: “It’s not going to look like much at first—but it’s working.”

And I think you can measure momentum. Not just adoption metrics, but something simpler: how many people are coming to you without you pushing them? That’s real traction. You don’t have to chase them. They’re curious. They’ve seen the early wins.

Another big one is humility. You’ve got to respect the people who resist you. That doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but it means understanding. Maybe they need to see social proof. Maybe they’re waiting for cover from another leader. Maybe they’re not comfortable standing out.

None of that means they’re wrong. It just means they’re human. So work with the confident few first and bring in the rest when they’re ready.

RB: Have you always approached resistance that way?

TV: Oh no—I learned that one the hard way.

Early in my career, I was running a workshop at Pearson. I was beating up on this publishing group about how they’re going to get killed by digital, and they were arguing. It was a really difficult conversation, and I was convinced I was right and they were wrong.

Afterward, one of the leaders pulled me aside and said, “I don’t disagree with what you said. I think you’re right. But I didn’t like how you made us feel.”

And that was the moment. They weren’t resisting because of the content. They were reacting to how I delivered it. I made them feel stupid, even if I didn’t mean to. And their only move was to push back.

It took me years to absorb that lesson. But now I never forget: if people are resisting, check the emotional tone before you check the content.

RB: Last question. What is one thing you’d like to say to corporate leaders trying to drive innovation?

TV: Just chill!

Seriously. There’s so much *efforting* in corporate transformation. All the chasing, tracking, nudging, following up. “Have they responded to the email? Did you call them?” All that pressure to push, to prove.

But it reminds me of this Malcolm Gladwell podcast, Relax and Win, about San Jose State sprinters. Their coach taught them that to run their fastest, they had to stay relaxed. When you tense up, you actually slow down.

Innovation works the same way. Don’t force it. Build momentum. Let it grow. And trust it once it’s moving.

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The real challenge in corporate innovation isn’t convincing people that change is needed—it’s helping them feel safe enough to join you.

This conversation with Tendayi reminded me that the most effective innovation leaders don’t lead with pressure or pitch decks. They lead with patience, empathy, and small wins that build momentum.

Image credit: Pexels, Tendayi Viki (via LinkedIn)

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Three Real Business Threats (and How to Solve Them)

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“The Call is Coming from Inside the House”

Three Real Business Threats (and How to Solve Them)

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“The call is coming from inside the house” is one of those classic quotes that crossed over from urban legend and horror movies to become a common pop-culture phrase. While originally a warning to teenage babysitters, recent research indicates that it’s also a warning to corporate execs that murderous business threats are closer than they think.

In the early weeks of 2025, Box of Crayons, a Toronto-based learning and development company, partnered with The Harris Poll to survey over 1500 business leaders and knowledge workers to diagnose and understand the greatest challenges facing organizations.

They found that “while there is a tendency to focus on external pressures like economic uncertainty, technological disruptions, and labor market issues, our research shows the most critical challenges are unfolding within the workplace itself.”

The threat is coming from inside your house.

Here’s what they found and what you can do about it

Nearly one (1) day each workweek “is lost to the fear of making mistakes.”

Fear is at the core of all the issues making headlines – burnout, disengagement, lost productivity. It “breeds doubt, prompting individuals to question themselves and others, instigating anxiety, hindering productivity, and promoting blame instead of teamwork.”

Fear is also a virus, spreading rapidly from one person to their team members and on and on until it infects the entire organization, embedding itself in the culture.

Executives and managers are key to breaking the cycle of fear that kills innovation, initiative, and growth. By reframing mistakes and learnings, rewarding smart risks even if they result in unexpected outcomes, and role-modeling behaviors that encourage trust and psychological safety, their daily and consistent actions can encourage bravery and remaking the culture.

70% of people don’t see value in listening to people they disagree with.

Unless you’re employed by Lumon Industries, it’s impossible to be a completely different person at work compared to who you are outside of work. So, it should come as no surprise that most people no longer listen to opinions, perspectives, or evidence with which they disagree.

The problem is that different perspectives and experiences are essential to elements of the problem-solving process. Without them, we cannot learn, develop new solutions, and innovate.

Again, executives and managers play a critical role in helping to surface diverse points of view and helping employees to engage in “productive conflict.” Rather than rushing to “consensus” or rapidly making a decision, by expressing curiosity and asking questions, people-leaders create space for new points of view and role model how to encourage and use it.

87% of leaders lack the skills needed to adapt. 64% say funding to build those skills has been cut.

Business leaders are fully aware of the changes happening within their teams, organizations, and the broader world. They recognize the need to constantly adapt, learn, and develop the skills required to respond to these changes. They can even articulate what they need help with, why, and how it will benefit the team or organization.

But leadership training is often one of the first items to be cut, leaving new and experienced people-leaders “ill-equipped to manage the increasing complexity of today’s workplace, stifling their ability to inspire, guide, and support their teams effectively.”

The solution is simple – invest in people. Given the acute need for support and training, forget big programs, multi-day offsites, and centralized learning agendas. Talk to the people asking for help to understand what they want and need and how they learn best. Share what you can do right now with the resources you have and engage them in creating a plan that helps them within the constraints of the current context.

Answer the phone

Just like that terrifying movie moment, the call threatening your business isn’t coming from mysterious outside forces—it’s echoing through your own hallways. The good news? Unlike those helpless babysitters in horror films, you can change the ending by confronting these internal threats head-on.

What internal “call” is your organization ignoring that deserves immediate attention?

Image credit: Unsplash

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What Innovation is Really About

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What Innovation is Really About

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Sometimes a short and simple word-play brings out some great reflection.

Resistance kills Change
Fear kills Experimentation
Bureaucracy kills Speed
Control kills Flexibility
Tradition kills Disruption
Pressure kills Creativity
Hierarchy kills Agility
Silos kills Collaboration
Organizational inertia trumps Talent

Now, read that RIGHT to LEFT.

This is in many ways the essence of innovation in my view.

Image Credits: Stefan Lindegaard

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