Tag Archives: Strategy

De-Risking the Pivot

Leave a reply

How to Change Direction Without Losing Momentum

De-Risking the Pivot

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato
LAST UPDATED: January 26, 2026 at 6:21PM

In the high-stakes theater of modern business, the word “pivot” is often used as a euphemism for a frantic, last-ditch effort to save a sinking ship. But in the world of human-centered innovation, a pivot shouldn’t be a desperate lurch. Instead, it should be a graceful shift in weight — a calculated adjustment based on new evidence that keeps the organization moving forward without shattering its internal culture or depleting its capital.

Innovation is inherently messy, but the risk of changing direction is often lower than the risk of staying the course on a failing hypothesis. The challenge lies in momentum management. How do we shift the “what” and the “how” without losing the “why” that keeps our employees engaged and our customers loyal?

“A pivot is not a failure of vision; it is a victory of insight over ego. The goal isn’t to be right the first time, but to be right when it finally counts.”

— Braden Kelley

The Architecture of a Human-Centered Pivot

To de-risk a pivot, we must move away from abstract technology-led strategies and return to purposeful learning. This requires three foundational pillars:

  • Continuous Feedback Loops: If you only listen to customers once a year, a pivot will feel like an earthquake. If you listen daily, it feels like navigation.
  • Psychological Safety: Teams must feel safe enough to admit that a prototype is failing. Without this, they will hide the truth until the cliff is unavoidable.
  • Modular Strategy: Build your initiatives so components can be repurposed. Don’t build a monolith; build a library of capabilities.

Why Pivots So Often Destroy Momentum

Most pivots fail not because the new direction is wrong, but because the transition is mishandled. Leaders announce abrupt shifts without context, invalidate prior work, or overload teams with conflicting priorities. The result is confusion, cynicism, and disengagement.

Common momentum killers include:

  • Declaring past efforts a failure instead of a foundation
  • Changing strategy without changing incentives or metrics
  • Asking teams to pivot without removing legacy commitments
  • Withholding the data that triggered the change

When people feel whiplash rather than continuity, they slow down. Momentum is not lost because direction changed — it is lost because meaning was broken.

The Human Psychology of Directional Change

From a human perspective, pivots threaten identity. Teams invest time, pride, and personal credibility in their work. When leaders abruptly change course, people often hear, “What you did no longer matters.”

De-risking a pivot requires re-framing it as a learning milestone, not a repudiation. Effective leaders make it clear that the organization is not abandoning effort — it is capitalizing on insight.

Case Study 1: The Transition from Product to Platform

Consider a mid-sized industrial firm we worked with that specialized in high-end HVAC sensors. They realized their hardware was becoming a commodity. The data the sensors produced, however, was priceless. To pivot toward a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, they didn’t fire their engineers. They engaged them in collaborative solution-sketching.

By focusing on the real-world outcome — energy efficiency and predictive maintenance — they maintained momentum. The employees weren’t “switching jobs”; they were “upgrading the value” they provided to the same customers. This human-centered approach reduced turnover during the transition by 40% compared to industry benchmarks.

Case Study 2: Re-aligning with the Customer Reality

A retail brand once spent millions on a “store of the future” featuring VR mirrors and robotic assistants. It was flashy, but it was abstract technology that didn’t solve a problem. Customer feedback (captured on simple paper surveys and through direct observation) showed that shoppers actually wanted faster checkout and better lighting in fitting rooms.

The pivot was swift: they stripped away the “futuristic” gadgets and reinvested in practical tools for staff. Because the leadership framed this not as a “mistake” but as disciplined learning, the store managers felt empowered rather than defeated. Sales rose by 22% within six months.

“A pivot should feel less like slamming the brakes and more like changing lanes at speed—guided by evidence, trust, and intent.”

— Braden Kelley

The Role of the Innovation Leader

As a leader, your job is to be the Chief Meaning Officer. When the direction changes, you must connect the dots between the old path and the new one. Use handwritten notes, face-to-face town halls, and authentic communication. Show the “metrics on simple screens” that prove why the change is necessary. When people understand the evidence, they will follow the insight.

How to De-Risk the Pivot

Leaders can dramatically reduce pivot risk by following a few human-centered principles:

  • Anchor the change in evidence: Share the signals that made the pivot necessary
  • Name what stays the same: Values, goals, and core strengths should feel stable
  • Retire old work explicitly: Do not ask teams to carry two strategies at once
  • Align incentives quickly: Metrics should reinforce the new direction immediately

A pivot without structural reinforcement is just a speech.

Momentum Is Emotional Before It Is Operational

Organizations often treat momentum as a function of process and speed. In reality, momentum is emotional first. It comes from belief, clarity, and a sense that effort compounds rather than evaporates.

When people believe that learning is valued and that change is purposeful, they move faster — even in uncertainty.

Conclusion: Pivots Are Proof of Learning

The most innovative organizations are not those that never change direction, but those that change direction with discipline, transparency, and respect for human effort.

A well-executed pivot sends a powerful signal: we are paying attention, we are learning, and we are confident enough to evolve without losing ourselves.

That is how organizations adapt without stalling — and how they turn uncertainty into sustained momentum.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you know when it is time to pivot versus when to persevere?

It is time to pivot when your core assumptions have been invalidated by real-world data, and despite iterative improvements, your key performance metrics remain stagnant. Perseverance is for when the “why” is still valid but the “how” needs more refinement.

How can a company maintain employee morale during a major shift in direction?

Transparency is the primary tool for morale. By involving employees in the “learning journey” — sharing customer feedback and prototypes early — the pivot becomes a collective discovery rather than a top-down mandate.

What is the biggest risk during a business pivot?

The biggest risk is “cultural whiplash,” where the organization loses its sense of identity and purpose. De-risking requires anchoring the pivot in the organization’s existing values and long-term mission.
For more insights on driving sustainable change, consider booking an innovation speaker who understands the human element of technology.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

Image credits: ChatGPT

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

Developing a Holistic Strategy for Change Leadership

Leave a reply

Developing a Holistic Strategy for Change Leadership

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Change leadership is a highly sought-after skill in today’s business world. Companies are constantly in a state of flux, and leaders who can successfully manage change are invaluable. Developing a holistic strategy for change leadership is essential for any organization looking to stay competitive.

Change leadership requires a comprehensive approach that takes into account the complexities of the organization and its environment. A holistic strategy for change leadership should include an analysis of the organization’s current situation and future goals, an assessment of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and an understanding of the external environment. It should also involve a thorough analysis of the organization’s culture, values, and systems, as well as a plan for how to address any potential resistance to change.

Once the organization’s current situation and desired future state have been identified, it is important to develop a plan for how to get there. This plan should include clear objectives, a timeline for achieving each goal, and a strategy for how to implement the changes. It should also include an evaluation process to ensure that the organization is progressing towards its goals and identify areas that need improvement.

Communication is key to successful change leadership. Leaders must be able to effectively communicate the objectives and timeline of the change initiative to the entire organization. It is also important to ensure that everyone involved in the process understands their role and is willing to take responsibility for their part. Regular feedback should be sought in order to keep the process on track and to identify any potential roadblocks.

Taken differently, here are eight key components that should be part of any holistic strategy for change leadership:

1. Create a Vision and Goals: Establish clear and measurable objectives for the change process.

2. Understand the Change: Conduct research to identify the drivers of change and the underlying dynamics of the organization.

3. Develop a Change Plan: Create a comprehensive plan that outlines the steps necessary to achieve the desired change.

4. Communicate the Plan: Clearly and consistently communicate the change plan to all stakeholders.

5. Engage Stakeholders: Establish meaningful relationships with stakeholders to ensure their support and commitment to the change process.

6. Implement the Plan: Develop and implement the resources and processes necessary to effect the change.

7. Monitor Progress: Track the progress of the change process and make necessary adjustments.

8. Reinforce the Change: Establish processes to reinforce the desired behaviors and ensure long-term success.

Finally, it is important to recognize that successful change does not happen overnight. Change initiatives often require a long-term commitment and dedication from everyone involved. Leaders need to be patient and supportive of the process, and be willing to make adjustments as needed.

Developing a holistic strategy for change leadership is essential for any organization looking to remain competitive. Taking the time to thoroughly analyze the organization’s current situation, understand its culture and values, and create a plan for how to implement change is the key to success. With a well-thought-out strategy and effective communication, change can be successfully managed, and the organization can reach its goals.

Image credit: Pixabay

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

13 Change Management Experts Share Their Tips

2 Replies

13 Change Management Experts Share Their Tips

Recently my colleague Daniel Lock collected and published points-of-view (POV) from 13 change management experts on implementing fast, dramatic and powerful change.

Here is mine:

If your change effort or project begins in a Microsoft Word document, you’re already in a whole world of trouble. Change is a human endeavor, so the most powerful way to embark on creating a dramatic and powerful change on an aggressive timeline is to surface the key challenges and opportunities as early as possible.
That doesn’t happen with a single individual tapping away at the keys entering prose or data into a traditional project charter. Instead, I recommend taking the following three steps to accelerate your change effort or project and increase its chances of success:

1. Evaluate the Change Readiness of Your Organization

Too often we just jump in and announce the start of projects and change initiatives without even looking around to see if the resources that are going to be crucial to our success are even available.

Convene a cross-functional change planning team to identify the resources you are going to need to successfully complete the project (physical, financial, human, etc.). Then begin to draft an initial high level project schedule including when different resources will need and map that against their availability (including their commitments to other existing and potential projects and change initiatives) to create a change readiness heat map.

My PCC Change Readiness Framework and Worksheet from the Change Planning Toolkit™ are also useful tools for evaluating your change readiness.

2. Architect Your Organization for Change

One of the biggest barriers to successful change initiatives is viewing change management as a subset of project management when we should really all be instead viewing project management as a subset of change management, and but one of Five Keys to Successful Change.

Consciously approaching the design of our organization and how it operates from the outside as changes in the environment dictate changes inside our organization can benefit from using a tool like the Architecting the Organization for Change framework.

3. Develop a Holistic View of the Change You’re Trying to Make

Change planning should never be a solo activity. You must identify those individuals who can verbalize the current and desired states, the risks and resources, identify the potential barriers and benefits, craft effective communications, etc.

You need to also involve people who know how to leverage a human-centered approach to affecting change using The Eleven Change Roles and who can build and maintain momentum by understanding and harness The Eight Change Mindsets that cause people to choose change.

I truly believe that only by taking a more visual, collaborative approach to change and capturing the key information on a single page using the Change Planning Canvas™ as you build your change plan, will you ever create and sustain the alignment necessary to beat the 70% change failure rate.

Click here to read responses from the 12 other change management experts


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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

Taking Four Different Paths to Innovation

Leave a reply

Taking Four Different Paths to InnovationInterview with Gijs van Wulfen

I had the opportunity recently to interview fellow Innovation author Gijs van Wulfen to talk with him about his new book The Innovation Maze, which is a follow-up to his great first book The Innovation Expedition.

1. In the book you cite a study saying companies reported a drop in breakthrough ideas between the mid 1990’s and 2010. What do you attribute this drop to?

The share of breakthrough new products has been halved in the last decades from 20.4% in the mid-1990s to only 11.5% in 2010. Companies tend to prefer incremental innovations in small steps over breakthrough innovations in big jumps as they can be implemented faster with less perceived risk and fewer resources needed. Just take a look at how innovation budgets are spent: 58% of R&D spending is directed at incremental or renewal innovations, 28% at new or substantial innovations, and only 14% at breakthrough or radical innovations. It seems there’s a growing dislike for risks what causes incremental innovations to dominate. I like to quote the CEO of BMW AG, the German luxury car producer, Dr. Ing. Norbert Reithofer. When asked why BMW started the risky E-car project with the BMWi-3 and i-8 he responded very openly: “Because doing nothing was an even bigger risk.”

2. At the beginning of your book you highlight “15 Obstacles Hindering Innovation At Its Start”, if you could only eliminate three, which three would you choose?

Actually my personal goal is to eliminate all 15 obstacles which hinder innovation at the start, Braden. With the right approach, I even think it’s possible too. That’s why I’ve written The Innovation Maze. If I could eliminate three, I would choose the ones which are hindering people in organizations the most:

  1. No priority for innovation. This is relatively easy to solve, as you only have to pick the right moment. Never present a new radical innovation project to your board when business is going up fine.

  2. No market need. The biggest problem for start-ups or R&D-projects in big firms is that they provide solutions without a problem. Connecting to customers and matching potential solutions with relevant customer frictions at the start of innovation is essential. With out a customer need there is no market.

  3. No business model. Innovations are not viable without a business model. Experimenting with pretotypes or prototypes in the early phases of the development process is essential to test if your business model is viable.

Gijs van Wulfen3. Google no longer does 20% time, why do you think that is?

In 2013 Google began cutting back on their policy to give employees 20 percent of their work time to pursue projects they are passionate about, even if it is outside the core job or core mission of the company. They replaced it with a more focused approach to innovation instigated by CEO Larry Page. It resulted in more tightly targeted innovation activities, rather than the ‘scattergun’ innovation approach that was created by Google ‘20% time’. I am a fan of focused innovation, as this will increase the chance of success as less projects will get better people and more funds. It fits better Google, as a big company, with more than 60.000 employees.

4. People love to ideate and often equate ideation with innovation (which they shouldn’t). What tips would you offer to help people have a great ideation session?

Well, I have found 25 elements which are necessary creating a perfect ideation session:

Highly relevant
— Define a relevant innovation assignment, which is a challenge for the organization and the people you invite.
— Make the assignment concrete and s.m.a.r.t.
— Create momentum for ideation. Something important must happen now!

Diverse group of participants
— Invite people for whom the assignment is personally relevant.
— Invite people for both content as well as decision-making capabilities.
— Include outsiders and outside-the-box thinkers.
— Include an even mix of men and women, young & old, et cetera.
— Invite the internal senior problem-owner (CEO or vice president) to participate.

Special setting
— Look for a special and harmonious venue, fitting your innovation assignment.
— Create an (emotionally) safe environment where you can be yourself.
— Don’t allow smartphones and iPads to ring or flash.
— Never- and I really mean never do any brainstorming at the office.

Effectively structured process
— Allow at least two days for effective ideation to reach concrete new concepts.
— Spend twice as much time on the convergence process as on the divergence process.
— Plan and prepare an effective combination of idea-generating techniques.
— Be open to suggestions from the group to adapt the process.
— Make sure it is enjoyable. Fun promotes good results.
— Time box. Make sure everybody is aware of the time limits- and sticks to them.
— Hire a visualizer or cartoonist to visualize the results
— Keep up the pace; otherwise it becomes long-winded and boring.

Facilitated by a professional
— Appoint an (internal) facilitator, who stays in the background and exercises light control.
— The facilitator should reflect the opposite energy of the group. If the group is too active: exert calmness.
— The facilitator mustn’t lose sight of sub groups; constantly monitoring their progress.

Concrete output
— Make the output very concrete and clear to anybody.
— Creating concepts together with your colleagues generates maximum internal support.

The experience of sharing ideas in a structured process and drafting concrete concepts from the best ideas has a great impact on group dynamics. At the end the whole group feels ownership of all the concepts. That is essential. New ideas need a lot of ‘parents’ to survive the product development process in a corporate culture.

4 Different Paths to Innovation

5. Where do you stand on breakthrough innovation vs. incremental innovation debate?

Should you focus on incremental innovations, radical innovations, or both? This depends on your role and situation. Startups mostly enter a market with a radical innovation. Facebook, and Twitter created new markets with new-to-the-world offerings. Tesla, Uber and AirBnB broke into existing markets surprising the incumbents with their new-to-the-world offerings. Existing organizations are mostly reactive innovators, which puts them in the situation where they have to quickly come up with innovations as the urgency is high. For them, incremental innovations are faster to develop with less risk. However, that won’t be enough in the long term as they also have to come up with radical innovations in order for their organization to grow again in the longer term. It’s essential that you find a good balance between incremental innovations, improvement of present products and services, and radical innovations focusing on big ideas which are outside the present comfort zone of your organization. With incremental innovations you prove to your customers and staff that you indeed can innovate and thereby build the confidence you will need to make bigger strides, once your radical innovations hit the market later.

6. Why is ‘checking for fit’ so important? What do people risk if they skip this step?

When you (and your innovation team) have come up with great ideas the question is how to make them reality. In practice, I have learned that if they don’t fit your personal goals as a start-up founder or your organizational goals as a corporate innovator, nothing will materialize in the end. It is essential to check this fit as early as possible in your innovation journey. If you skip this step you can almost be certain that someone will stop you later. The best excuse ever for risk-avoiding-bosses is “it doesn’t fit the strategy”.

7. Understanding customers is of course important, so what are your favorite tools for achieving customer understanding?

My three favorite tools for understanding customers are: customer journey mapping, identifying customer frictions and lead-user research. With the first one you identify all the factors influencing the customer experience from the customer’s perspective in a customer journey map. This is a great technique to use in service innovation, as a service is often so intangible and the user experience is actually your offering. The second technique identifies customer frictions via focus groups. This is a very practical technique which you can use in any innovation project to get to know a better understanding of your customers likes and dislikes. The third one is lead user research. Identifying the behavior of lead-users and co-creating with them is intensive and time-consuming and especially useful when you want to discover unmet latent needs and create more revolutionary ideas.

8. What is the best way for people to document the business case for an idea?

For more than 10 years, I have been using and giving instructions on a handy, practical framework for a new business case. My advice is to just use PowerPoint (or keynote) instead of writing a full written report, as nobody will read it anyway. Here’s the framework of a seven (7) page new business case, which you can present in 20 minutes at the most.

Slide 1. The Customer Friction.
— The customer situation.
— The customer need.
— The customer friction (problem/challenge).

Slide 2. Our New Concept.
— The customer target group (qualitative and quantitative).
— The marketing mix of the new product, service or business model.
— New for…. (the world, the market, our company).

Slide 3. This Makes our Concept Unique.
— Buying arguments for the customer.
— Current solutions and competitors.
— Our positioning.

Slide 4. It will be Feasible.
— We are able to develop it.
— We are able to produce it.
— The development process.

Slide 5. What’s in it for us.
— The number of customers (in year three).
— The projected revenues (in year three).
— The projected profits (in year three).

Slide 6. Why now?
— Why to develop it now.
— What if we say no.

Slide 7. The Decision to Proceed.
— The major uncertainties.
— The development team,
— The process, costs and planning.

Thanks for the interview Braden. I wish everybody great – and successful journeys through the innovation maze.

Thanks to you Gijs for sharing your insights with our global innovation community!

To learn more about Gijs’ four paths to innovation, grab yourself a copy of his new book his new book The Innovation Maze.

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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

Digital Transformation Matters

1 Reply

Digital Transformation Matters

The pace of change is accelerating.

Much has changed since we all started to dial in with our modems and connect to online services like America Online or Compuserve and eventually directly onto the Internet and the World Wide Web. Elements of our digital world continue to invade our language and our consciousness.

  • “Text me later.”
  • “Skype me tomorrow.”
  • “Google it.”
  • “#hashtag”
  • “rtofl”

Whether we like it or not the physical world and the digital world, and people are more likely to freak out about leaving their mobile phone at home than their wallet. Soon you won’t even need to carry a wallet (unless you want to). Canada stopped making pennies. In Sweden many businesses no longer take cash. Have you tried buying a drink on an airplane lately? (no cash accepted there either)

We now live in a digital age.

Not because technology is new, but because the way we react to technology and interact with it is different.

We’ve had technology for a while, but we used it primarily for performing calculations, and then for information storage and retrieval. But now, because the computer has moved from being a machine in a lab programmed with punch cards, to something nearly every one of us carries in our pocket or wears on our wrist, we’re beginning to form relationships with machines and more importantly, to use our machines to form, maintain, and even deepen, our human relationships.

So what does this mean for you as a business person?

It means that people like me have to drag you kicking and screaming away from the way you’ve always done business, away from the way you’ve always structured your enterprise, away from the ways you’ve facilitated communication among employees and between you and your customers, partners, and suppliers and towards a fundamentally different way of organizing and operating your business.

Are you ready to do business in a digital way for the digital age?

No?

Well, your market is large and attractive to me and my digital native friends. While you struggle under the weight of your legacy systems and the denial that you must change how you think, change how you interact with customers, change how your business works inside, maybe we will re-imagine your business and your entire industry from the ground up with a collection of digital strategies that utilize the power of the digital mindset to more efficiently and effectively utilize people, process and technology with some venture capital backing to challenge the incumbents and put them out of business. People are fascinated with startups like Uber and with good reason, but they should also be looking at what established technology companies like Amazon are doing because you’re either have to think like a technology company or go out of business.

In my next article on digital transformation we will circle back to discuss Uber in a bit more detail as we explore the difference between a digital strategy and a digital transformation. Because they are not the same and are vastly different in what they require to be successful. The one thing they both have in common is that they will inflict change (in varying amounts) upon the organization, and with a more visual, collaborative approach to planning that change – like that enabled by the Change Planning Toolkit™ that I introduce in my new book Charting Change – you will increase your odds of beating the 70% change failure rate and successfully achieving your digital change goals.

Stay tuned!

This article originally appeared on Linkedin

Accelerate your change and transformation success

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

Innovation is Human

Leave a reply

Innovation is Human

In many ways organizations are like humans, and others have described organizations and organizational change in biological terms before. But this biological context applies to innovation as well, and I’d like to put it forward quickly in simple terms.

As humans we must eat to survive, but if we focus too much on eating, we get unhealthy.

If we don’t focus enough on eating or if we eat the wrong things, we get unhealthy.

If we don’t enjoy enough variety in our experiences, we get unhealthy.

If we don’t spend enough time synthesizing those new experiences to uncover insights via sleep, we get unhealthy.

If we don’t eliminate our waste, we get unhealthy.

And finally, and probably most important to our health, we must exercise to increase our strength, flexibility, agility, reduce our stress levels, to build new capabilities, and to increase our longevity.

But, you can exercise too much, and get unhealthy as well.

The key is balance.

And the same is true for organizations, and parallels for all of these human activities can be drawn to the activities of organizations as well.

And while our interactions with food can be compared to our focus on the day to day operations within the context of the organization, the pursuit of innovation is the exercise for the organization.

And in much the same way that many people resist exercise even though they know it is good for them, many organizations do as well.

But for organizations to stay fit and enjoy a long and productive life, they must strike that balance between a healthy diet and exercise.

So, is your organization going to be fit or fat?

And next time someone in your organization says that innovation isn’t important, or that they can’t focus on it right now, ask them if they think exercise is important, then remind them that innovation like exercise is how we reinvigorate our organizations and keep them vibrant and alive, and go find yourself a carrot stick.

Keep innovating!

Image credit: fitinafatworld.wordpress.com

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

The Wonderful World of Downsizing

Leave a reply

Stikkee Situations - Downsizing Cartoon

In Stikkee Situations we’ll try to take a humorous look at a lot of different serious business topics.

In this episode we poke fun at the wonderful world of downsizing.

Employees hate workforce reductions (aka downsizing), but some CEOs (even in profitable companies) seem to love these traumatic events as a tool to save their job and to drive short-term movements in the price of a company’s stock price, often coming on the heels of a company missing their earnings estimates.

But the positive short term stock price effects of an across the board workforce reduction come with heavy consequences, several of which greatly affect the innovation capacity of the organization, including:

  1. Destruction of trust within the organization
  2. Reduction in collaboration in the organization
  3. Loss of forward momentum on project work
  4. Loss of some of your best talent as they proactively find themselves jobs elsewhere
  5. Reduction in passion, creativity, and engagement among those who remain
  6. Elimination or reduction in the organization’s commitment to innovation

Now of course sometimes workforce reductions are necessary to avoid bankruptcy or for strategic realignment (removing human resources from business areas you are exiting), and they can be potentially healthy for the organization.

But, when downsizing is done purely to please wall street and in an untargeted way, in the long run I would assert that the organization suffers more than it benefits because any reduction in forward innovation momentum is an invitation to competitors and startups to speed past you.

So, keep innovating!

Please note the following licensing terms for Stikkee Situations cartoons:

1. BLOGS – Link back to https://bradenkelley.com/category/stikkees/ and you can embed them for free
2. PRESENTATIONS, please send $25 to me on PayPal by clicking the button 3. NEWSLETTERS & WEB SITES, please send me $50 on PayPal by clicking the button
License for presentations - $25
License for newsletters and web sites - $50

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

Looking at Healthcare Innovation from the Inside Out

Leave a reply

Taking a Swing at Healthcare InnovationAfter working for the last decade helping organizations from the OUTSIDE IN:

  • Build innovative marketing strategies

  • Manage multiple, simultaneous, cross-functional business projects

  • Optimize complex processes

  • Create an enterprise-wide innovation-focus

I thought it was time to flip things around and go native, and work with an outstanding organization to make some of these things happen from the INSIDE OUT.

I thought it was also time to dig deeper into an industry, get my hands dirty, and really come to know a particular vertical. And what could be more interesting in this time of rapidly escalating costs and innovation than the healthcare industry?

[Especially with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) going into force here in the USA]

It is with all of this in mind that I am happy to announce that I have taken an internal consulting position with Premera, one of the largest health plans in the Pacific Northwest.

Premera serves 1.5 million people—from individuals and families to Fortune 100 employer groups. Premera’s mission is to provide peace of mind to their customers about their healthcare.

As a result of joining up with Premera, I must also announce for this post and all future posts that the views here (and elsewhere) are mine and mine alone, and do not in any way represent the views of Premera.

This isn’t the end of my publishing here on BradenKelley.com or on Innovation Excellence (now Disruptor League) or the other places that I contribute. In my spare time I will still be writing, and doing the occasional innovation keynote or workshop in various places around the globe.

So, please keep in touch, and stay tuned for more to come!


Build a common language of innovation on your team

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

Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 10, 2012

Leave a reply

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”

– Steve Jobs

“While an innovation vision determines the kinds of innovation that an organization, and an innovation strategy determines what the organization will focus on when it comes to innovation, it is the innovation goals that break things down into tangible objectives that employees can work against.”

– Braden Kelley

“Innovation is creativity with a job to do.”

– John Emmerling

What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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

Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 8, 2012

Leave a reply

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”

– Jack Welch

“An innovation strategy is not merely a technology roadmap from R&D or an agenda for new product development. Instead, an innovation strategy identifies who will drive a company’s profitable revenue growth and what will represent a strong competitive advantage for the firm going forward. Under this umbrella the innovation goals for the organization can be created.”

– Braden Kelley

“Innovation is part of a process that involves creating something new (invention), figuring out how to commercialize it (innovation) and then actually getting to adopt it (marketing)”

– Noah Brier, Percolate
Submitted by Jason Williams

What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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