Most companies fail at innovation because they fail at change.
There you go, there is the entire article in a single sentence. Please click the like button or leave a comment on your way out, and I’ll turn out the lights.
I’m actually serious, but I didn’t come to this single sentence overnight, but through decades of research and experience. It coalesced however this morning in an interview with Chad McAllister that will air next month.
This sentence also highlights the reason why after writing the popular Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire (a book about innovation) and traveling the world delivering innovation keynotes and workshops, that my next book for Palgrave Macmillan (@PalgraveBiz) will be about change, not innovation.
Because after all, my life’s work is to help others change the world for the better by creating and sharing valuable tools and insights that hopefully serve to accelerate innovation and change in communities around the world.
I will continue on to say though that if you want to be successful at innovation you need to get better at planning, leading, managing, and maintaining change.
If you doubt the linkage, please check out my other article Managing Innovation is About Managing Change. This will give you a great example of how innovation inflicts change on the organization.
And if you’d like to learn more about making your organization more change capable, then I encourage you to check out my article Change the World – Step One, which is the first in a series of articles I will be publishing here in the run up to the launch of my book in January 2016 to help organizations build a stronger, more sustainable approach to change. This first article outlines the Four Keys to Successful Change, with much more content and a whole Change Planning Toolkit™ being released over the next few months.
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