You Already Have Too Many Ideas

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You Already Have Too Many Ideas

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Innovation isn’t achieved by creating more ideas. Innovation is realized when ideas are transformed into commercialized products and services. Innovation is realized when ideas are transformed into new business models that deliver novel usefulness to customers and deliver increased revenues to the company.

In a way, creating ideas that languish in their own shadow is worse than not creating any ideas at all. If you don’t have any ideas, at least you didn’t spend the resources to create them and you don’t create the illusion that you’re actually making progress. In that way, it’s better to avoid creating new ideas if you’re not going to do anything with them. At least your leadership team will not be able to rationalize that everything will be okay because you have an active idea generation engine.

Before you schedule your next innovation session, don’t. Reason 1 – it’s not an innovation session, it’s an ideation session. Reason 2 – you don’t have resources to do anything with the best ideas so you’ll spend the resources and nothing will come of it. To improve the return on investment, don’t make the investment because there will be no return.

Truth is, you already have amazing ideas to grow your company. Problem is, no one is listening to the people with the ideas. And the bigger problem – because no one listened over the last ten years, the people with the ideas have left the company or stopped trying to convince you they have good ideas. Either way, you’re in trouble and creating more ideas won’t help you. Your culture is such that new ideas fall on deaf ears and funding to advance new concepts loses to continuous improvement.

If you do want to hold an ideation event to create new ideas that will reinvent your company, there are ways to do it effectively. First, define the customer of the ideation event. This is the person who is on the hook to commercialize things that will grow the business. This is the person who will have a career problem if ideas aren’t implemented. This is the person who can allocate the resources to turn the ideas into commercialized products, services. If this person isn’t an active advocate for the ideation event, don’t hold it. If this person will not show up to the report out of the ideation event, don’t hold it. If this person does not commit to advancing the best ideas, don’t hold the event.

Though innovation and ideas start with “i”, they’re not the same. Ideas are inexpensive to create but deliver no value. Innovation is expensive and delivers extreme value to customers and the company. If you’re not willing to convert the ideas into something that delivers values to customers, save the money and do continuous improvement. Your best people will leave, but at least you won’t waste money on creating ideas that will die on the vine.

If the resources aren’t lined up to run with the ideas, don’t generate the them. If you haven’t allocated the funding for the follow-on work, don’t create new ideas. If the person who is charged with growing the business isn’t asking for new ideas, don’t hold the ideation event.

You already have too many ideas. But what you lack is too few active projects to convert the best ideas into products and services that generate value for your customers and growth for your company.

Stop creating new ideas and start delivering novel usefulness to your customers.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Your Legends Define Your Culture

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Your Legend Defines Your Company Culture

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

It was about 50 years ago, in or around the mid to late 1970s, when a brand’s legendary story was born. This true story perfectly articulates this brand’s culture. It perfectly demonstrates how empowered employees should act and defines how customers should be treated. The story is Nordstrom’s legendary tire story.

The short version of the story is that a customer brought a pair of tires into a Nordstrom store in Fairbanks, Alaska, and asked to return them. He insisted he purchased them at that location. Craig Trounce, the store associate who was working that day, gave the customer a refund.

Obviously, Nordstrom doesn’t sell tires—and never did. However, in 1975, Nordstrom purchased three retail stores owned by Northern Commercial Company, which did sell tires. Once Nordstrom took over the stores, it restocked them with its own inventory, which didn’t include tires.

According to the story on the Nordstrom website, “Instead of turning the tires away, Craig wanted to do right by the customer, who had driven more than 50 miles with the intention of returning these tires. Knowing little about how tires are priced, Craig called a tire company to get their thoughts on how much the tires were worth. He then gave the customer the estimated amount, took the tires and sent him on his way.”

That story became the legend that defines Nordstrom’s culture. So, as a leader of your organization, what story does your company or brand have that defines your culture? If you don’t have one, maybe it’s time to find it. And it’s never too late.

John W. Nordstrom and his partner, Carl F. Wallin, opened their first store, a shoe store, in 1901. It wasn’t until 22 years later that they had their second store. In 1963 the store expanded beyond shoes and started selling clothing, and in 1971, the company went public and officially changed its name to Nordstrom.

The point is that it took almost 75 years for a company that already had a reputation for delivering an excellent service experience to create its legend. This single act of customer service has been told countless times in training sessions, books, articles and keynote speeches. It’s not just about tires or refunds. It’s about empowering employees to make good decisions. It’s about emphasizing a company’s culture. And if you could monetize it, how much money would a company have to pay to generate the positive PR this created for Nordstrom?

Many other companies have similar stories. Some of the more recognizable brands with “legend status” stories can be found through a Google search and include the Zappos 10-hour phone call that some say is an all-time customer service call record, the story of how empowered employees at the Ritz-Carlton are allowed to spend up to $2,000 to solve guest problems and many more.

So, what’s your legend? And if you don’t know, how do you find it?

I’m going to bet there is some account of how someone in your organization responded to a customer or did something of note that is worth sharing and turning into your version of the Nordstrom tire story. That’s the place to start. And the best way to go about it is to simply ask every employee to share their favorite story about how they created an amazing experience for one of your customers.

In this first round, don’t make this a huge writing assignment. Just ask for a few sentences. From there, someone (or a team) will sift through the responses and look for five or 10 that stand out. You’re looking for:

  1. moments in which employees went above and beyond
  2. situations that perfectly demonstrate your values
  3. stories that are simple to tell but powerful in impact

Then go back to the sources of these stories and ask for more detail. In a short time, you’ll have several great stories to consider. And in the process, you’ll also discover ideas based on these stories to turn into “best practices” examples that other employees can learn from and emulate.

Your service legend doesn’t need to involve tires or thousand-dollar gestures. It simply needs to authentically represent who you are as a company and what you stand for. The best legends aren’t manufactured. They’re discovered in the everyday actions of employees who truly understand and embrace your culture. When you find your story, celebrate it, share it and let it inspire the next generation of customer service excellence in your organization. After all, somewhere in your company today, an employee might be creating the next legendary story that will define your culture for years to come.

Image Credit: Pexels

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

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Portfolio Management and Category Power

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Portfolio Management and Category Power

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Portfolio management is the most consequential and the most challenging element in strategic planning. There is typically a ton of data, but none of it can really speak to the host of underlying risks that underpin long-range investments in net new lines of business, ones that pay off primarily in the out years. The best one can do is leverage experience, frameworks, and pattern recognition to navigate what are inevitably uncharted waters. With that in mind, here are some things to keep in view.

  1. Category Maturity Life Cycle: Tornadoes versus Main Street. Who doesn’t want a growth portfolio? To get one, however, means your enterprise must have meaningful plays in categories that are undergoing secular growth. Secular growth happens when net new budget is being created for a new purchase category across a broad spectrum of customers, a phase in technology adoption we have termed the tornado. Once the tornado has passed, the category will have an established place in these customers’ budgets going forward, a stage in the life cycle we call Main Street, one that is characterized by cyclical growth. Cyclical growth rewards inertial momentum, the goal being to leverage incumbency to grow wallet share more than market share. Secular growth rewards disruption, the goal being to displace an established profit pool by leveraging an emerging one. These dynamics transcend the efforts of most companies to influence (gorilla leaders being the exception), so assessing category power is first and foremost getting clarity on the hand you have been dealt. That will shape your ambitions for next year’s performance and set a baseline for future investment.

  2. Valuation: Growth investors versus value investors. Both forms of growth, secular and cyclical, are valued by investors for their respective risk-adjusted returns, but in different ways for different reasons. Growth investors are looking for a big pop and are willing for you to take considerable risk to get it. Value investors by contrast seek predictably consistent performance—an earnings-oriented approach that outperforms bonds with a minimum of additional risk. Both groups discount the value of the other group’s approach which exposes the market cap of established enterprises to a “conglomerate discount,” a painful penalty given that their stock is the major currency that will fund any M&A. Managing for shareholder value, in other words, gets hung up on the question, which shareholders? The reality is that most publicly held companies have a mix across the board, so the salient issue to address is how much of our operating budget should we commit to the current year versus the out years? Having a principled discussion on this topic leading to a definitive commitment is essential to creating a coherent strategy.

  3. Capital market status: PE-backed versus publicly held. Strategic planning in privately held enterprises is typically more straightforward because the board of directors representing the investing firms share a common approach to risk-adjusted returns. This is why when publicly held companies like Dell reach a crossroads that requires a patch of difficult sledding, they choose to take themselves private in order to accelerate their course corrections. The price to pay for this option is committing to operating principles, performance milestones, and a management discipline that meets the PE investors’ approval.

  4. Leveraging M&A: Incubate before you commit. Pundits like to claim that most M&A transactions fail to deliver on their promise (although recent research puts the odds at closer to fifty-fifty). Some of the failures, however, are self-inflicted wounds that can be avoided by taking a multi-step approach. If your enterprise has a venture investment capability, taking positions in disruptive start-ups with observer rights is a good way to test the waters. In parallel, the goal is to incubate comparable initiatives internally and get them into the market as trial balloons. The difference between this and the early-stage venture model is that you cannot wait for these organic efforts to scale—it will simply take too long. So, you are not trying to win the game with your new offers, just learn it. Sooner or later, you will turn to M&A to acquire something of meaningful mass, the difference being, because you have spent the intervening time in the market competing, you will be a much more knowledgeable acquirer than you otherwise would be.

  5. Synergy management: Year One is the one that matters most. Value-oriented M&A is intended to consolidate mature categories with cyclical growth. It is based on an inside-out approach to cost reduction focusing on eliminating duplicated functions, typically in the back office and the supply chain. Growth-oriented M&A, by contrast, takes an outside-in approach focusing on accelerating bookings and revenues through a series of go-to-market and customer success initiatives. When a smaller high-growth enterprise gets acquired by a larger, slower-growing one, the opportunity is to galvanize the latter’s existing customer base and ecosystem relationships, as well as its global sales and service footprint, to capture market share under highly favorable selling conditions. The trick is to do this quickly, while the iron is still hot, and that requires special incentives and strong management support to build trust between the old and new guards and to overcome the initial inertial resistance that accompanies any acquisition. In sum, what looks good on paper could very well be good in actual fact, but only after you execute Captain Picard’s famous dictum: Make it so!

  6. M&A integration: Year Two is the one that matters most. If the first year is all about getting the go-to-market right as fast as possible, the second is about creating lasting relationships that will enable the two enterprises to operate as one. There are four areas of interest here—the product team, the sales team, the management team, and the culture overall—and each one calls for a slightly different approach. The single most important outcome is to keep the product talent in place—they have the keys to the new kingdom. The sales team can and normally should continue to function as an overlay during the second year, but in parallel a transition to an integrated organization must begin so that in Year Three the overlay is eliminated. The management team is a wild card. Despite all the best intentions on both sides of the table, including vesting incentives of various kinds, entrepreneurial CEOs rarely stay, nor should they. The skillset for disrupting does not translate well into the skillset for scaling and optimizing. This suggests that from the outset a leadership transition should be on the table, typically enlisting an up-and-coming executive from the acquiring enterprise to personally throw themselves into the gap and pull the two organizations together leveraging every talent and tool they have. Finally, large enterprises necessarily entail an enormous amount of process management, something that goes against the grain of entrepreneurial culture, so one needs to tread carefully here, with the understanding that long term there can only be one enterprise, and by virtue of its scale, it will be process-driven for much of its day-to-day work. To promise the acquired company anything else will only create disillusion and disintegration down the line.

  7. Decision Time: To play or not to play. There is no formula for making transformational decisions, but there are some guidelines to keep in mind. The first is few, and far between. Transformations are disruptive to the core business that is funding your overall operation, and it takes time for everything to stabilize around a new portfolio. A second principle is existential threat. If the emerging category obsoletes a pillar of your core business, the way digital photography obsoleted film, the way that streaming is obsoleting conventional TV, then you must take action. Absent such a forcing function, a third principle to consider is value to the existing customer base, with the corollary of opportunity for our existing ecosystem. In other words, does the world want you to do this? Transformation takes a village, and it matters a great deal how much your constituencies will lean in to help you through it. Finally, when your competitors hear about this, will they smile and laugh, or will they say Oh sh*t! If the latter, it just puts icing on the cake.

  8. Plan B: Leverage the updraft. The stars have to align to make any transformational portfolio play work, and sometimes they simply won’t. Plan B is to incorporate a portion of the tornado category into your existing portfolio as a supplement. Take Gen AI, for example. You don’t have to be in the category like Open AI or Anthropic to participate in the new spending. Virtually any enterprise application can benefit from a Gen AI bolt-on to improve the user experience or simplify the administrative one. Prior experiences with adding mobile applications and digital commerce to legacy systems have delivered similarly positive returns. You don’t have to be in the lead, but customers do want to see you are still in the game, and assuming you show up with a working product, they are more than happy to consume it.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

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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.

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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!

Laura Weiss

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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Purpose Has Transformative Power

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Purpose Has Transformative Power

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Wherever I go in the world to speak and advise organizations, I always get the same question: “How can I get people to listen to my ideas?” The truth is that no one wants to listen to your ideas unless they solve a problem that is meaningful to them. So many initiatives fail because leaders get so focused on their passion for an idea that they fail to communicate it effectively.

People already have enough going on in their lives with their own responsibilities, ambitions and dreams. They have families to take care of, friends that they want to spend time with and their own ideas that they want to pursue. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully.

The truth is that good ideas fail all the time. In the two decades I have been researching and advising leaders about transformation, what I have found is that few have trouble coming up with new concepts. The hard part is to get others to buy in and work together towards a common purpose. That can only be done in the context of shared sense of values and mission.

Why Occupy Not Only Failed, But Could Never Succeed

On September 17, 2011, #Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park, in the heart of the financial district in Lower Manhattan. Declaring, “We are the 99%,” they captured the attention of the nation and then the world, eventually growing to encompass protests in 951 cities across 82 countries.

The protesters were angry and rightly so. A global economic elite had bilked us out of trillions and then gotten off scot-free. However, despite all of the self-righteous indignation, they offered no alternate vision of how they wanted things to be. There were no proposals for legislation, alternative business models or anything else really, just anger and frustration.

As Joe Nocera noted in the New York Times, the Occupy movement “had plenty of grievances, aimed mainly at the ‘oppressive’ power of corporations,” but “never got beyond their own slogans.” It’s never enough to merely point out what you don’t like — you need to put forward a clear idea of what you want instead.

When General Stanley McChrystal sought to transform military operations in Iraq, his mantra was “it takes a network to defeat a network” and he built his strategy for change around that one basic principle. Lou Gerstner pulled off one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in history by refocusing his organization from its proprietary “stack” of products to its customers’ “stack” of business processes.

A sense of grievance is never enough to bring change about. You need to put forward an affirmative vision of tomorrow.

How the Mission Drives Your Strategy

We usually think of strategy as a rational, analytic activity, with teams of MBA’s poring over spreadsheets. We often forget that strategy has to have a purpose and that purpose is almost always personal and emotive. Great strategy starts, not with analysis, but from defining and committing to a mission.

Strategy is never created on an empty canvas. While we can make rational assessments about whether we want to pursue a strategy based on low costs, differentiation or an attractive niche. We can, through investments and divestments, fill in missing pieces on a PowerPoint chart, but the fate of a strategy ultimately hinges on personality and ambition.

The success of Apple can’t be separated from Steve Jobs’ ambition to weave technology and design into products that were “insanely great.” Southwest’s dominance in the travel industry is a direct consequence of Herb Kelleher’s mission of being “THE low cost airline,” which drove everything he did from the planes he bought to which routes he competed on.

As Adam Michnik, one of the key intellectual leaders behind the Solidarity movement in Poland, put it, “Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.”

Any vision for the future needs to be rooted in desire and desires are essentially personal. They are deeply entrenched in our sense of self.

The Value of Values

The 2008 financial crisis posed serious challenges for every business. With sales taking a nosedive, companies had to make painful cuts to rein in costs. In the vast majority of cases, that meant layoffs and millions lost their jobs. It’s one of those understandable misfortunes.e No one likes it, but few see alternatives.

The steel giant Nucor, however, had pledged never to lay off employees and it cost it dearly. In 2009, the company lost $294 million dollars. At the time, many saw the move as quixotic and impractical. Yet the results speak for themselves. Today the company is valued more than 30% higher than its closest rival ArcelorMittal S.A., with significantly higher profit margins and twice the return on equity.

In The Good Jobs Strategy MIT’s Zeynep Ton tells a similar story about Mercadona, Spain’s leading discount retailer, when it needed to cut costs in 2008. Rather than cut wages or reduce staff, it asked its employees to contribute ideas. The result was that it managed to reduce prices by 10% and increased its market share from 15% in 2008 to 20% in 2012.

Values are how an enterprise honors its purpose. Yet living up to them involves certain costs. You can’t say you value employees and then lay them off at the first sign of trouble, just like you can’t say you value innovation and obsess about quarterly earnings. You can’t commit to a purpose without making hard choices.

We Need to Start Asking Different Questions

When the Business Roundtable issued a statement in 2019 that discarded the old notion that the sole purpose of a business is to provide value to shareholders, many were dismayed. Some thought it was just another example of misguided altruism by “elites.” Others saw it as a cynical and disingenuous ploy.

The truth is that the whole idea of shareholder capitalism was a cop-out. It gave leaders an excuse for not making choices because it implied that whatever the stock market valued was somehow more relevant than human agency. The anonymous collective of the market was primary, while individual choice was considered to be less consequential.

The ascendant concept of “stakeholder capitalism,” unfortunately, isn’t much better. Surely we can’t value all stakeholders equally. So which communities should we choose to serve? Which consumers do we value over others? Which partners do we choose to get in bed with? What standards should we insist that our suppliers meet?

None of these are easy questions. If for instance, we stop working with suppliers who don’t meet certain environmental or governance standards, we take away jobs from certain communities and run the risk of diminishing our ability to serve our customers. So we need to be thoughtful and offer intelligent standards making tough and uncertain choices

The reason so many organizations find themselves unable to pursue a purpose isn’t because they don’t want to, but because it is hard. Purpose doesn’t begin with a single step, but with a diverging path. We must choose one direction at the expense of another, or stay mired and lost, unable to move forward.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Dall-E

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Should We Stop Asking Employees to Innovate?

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Should We Stop Asking Employees to Innovate?

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

I recently revisited a comment from one of my older posts on how to train and educate executives on innovation. It went something like this:

“Innovation requires time and drive to explore new vistas, so it’s understandable that busy employees can’t be bothered with it. The best approach is for senior managers to assign a team, giving them the time and resources to innovate.”

While I agree that dedicated innovation teams with the right resources are crucial, the notion that “busy employees can’t be bothered” with innovation is not just dangerous, it’s short-sighted.

If leaders believe innovation is only for a select few, it signals that innovation isn’t truly a priority. And in today’s fast-evolving landscape, companies that don’t prioritize innovation throughout their ranks are setting themselves up for stagnation.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the matter:

1. Innovation isn’t just for the few, it’s for everyone – strategically.

Not every employee needs to work on breakthrough innovation, but every employee should have the opportunity to contribute. Whether through idea portals, hackathons, or innovation challenges, businesses should create accessible ways for employees to share their ideas and build on others’.

2. Innovation should happen in the day-to-day.

Often, the best innovations come from employees focused on improving their immediate environment. This type of incremental innovation – refining processes, enhancing services, or finding small but impactful efficiencies – should happen at the business unit level. Meanwhile, dedicated teams can tackle more disruptive and higher-risk projects with a long-term payoff.

3. It’s time to re-frame innovation.

The term “innovation” has become vague and overused. Consider a term like “impact” as a way to shift the focus from concepts to tangible results. Impact is measurable and reflects the outcome, not just the process. After all, what matters isn’t innovation for its own sake, but the meaningful change it brings.

Finally, corporate innovation teams should shift their roles from doers to facilitators and integrators – empowering business units to innovate while connecting internal and external resources. Collaboration, both within and outside the organization, accelerates innovation, increasing diversity of thought and speeding up results.

Scaling innovation across the company is a collective effort, not a siloed one.

What’s your take on this?

Image Credits: Pexels

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Addressing the Veteran Mental Health Crisis

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A New Frontier in Healing for Memorial Day Weekend

Addressing the Veteran Mental Health Crisis

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

As a nation, we have an enduring obligation to the brave individuals who have served in our military. On this Memorial Day weekend, while we honor their sacrifice, we must also look toward a future where we care for the psychological wounds of war. One of the greatest challenges we face is the veteran mental health crisis, with high rates of PTSD, depression, and suicide. Emerging research suggests that psychedelic treatments could significantly alleviate these conditions, providing a new pathway to healing that we cannot afford to ignore.

Understanding the Crisis

The statistics are alarming. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), approximately 17 veterans die by suicide every day. Furthermore, the VA estimates that around 15% of Vietnam veterans, 12% of Gulf War veterans, and 11-20% of veterans who served in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom suffer from PTSD in a given year. Traditional treatments like psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy have proven beneficial for some, but many veterans experience symptoms that persist despite these interventions.

The Promise of Psychedelics

In recent years, researchers have turned their attention to the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances such as MDMA, psilocybin, and LSD. These substances are showing promise in treating PTSD, depression, and other mental health issues. A landmark study conducted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in collaboration with the VA found that 67% of participants treated with MDMA-assisted therapy no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD after three sessions. This is a groundbreaking finding that cannot be ignored.

Similarly, psilocybin, the active compound in “magic mushrooms,” has shown potential in alleviating depression and anxiety symptoms in numerous studies. A study from Johns Hopkins Medicine demonstrated that psilocybin-assisted therapy resulted in rapid and sustained reductions in depression severity, with effects lasting for weeks and even months. The therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelics, which include altering neural network connectivity and promoting emotional processing, offer a new realm of possibilities for treatment.

Legal and Regulatory Challenges

Despite promising results, the legal status of these substances remains a significant barrier. Classified as Schedule I substances under the Controlled Substances Act, they are currently deemed to have “no accepted medical use.” However, as the evidence base strengthens, there is growing momentum for reevaluating this classification. States like Oregon and cities such as Denver have decriminalized psilocybin, paving the way for broader acceptance and access.

Building a Comprehensive Support System

To address the veteran mental health crisis effectively, we must take a multi-faceted approach:

  1. Policy Revision and Advocacy: It is crucial for policymakers to prioritize the revision of regulations surrounding psychedelics. We need comprehensive legislative efforts to reclassify these substances, allowing for more extensive research and greater accessibility.
  2. Research and Training: Increased funding for research into psychedelic-assisted therapies is essential. Universities, independent research organizations, and the VA should collaborate to expand clinical trials. Alongside research, training programs for mental health professionals must be developed to ensure they are well-equipped to provide these treatments safely and effectively.
  3. Education and Awareness: Public awareness campaigns can help destigmatize mental health and psychedelic treatments. Stories of healing and recovery should be shared, and educational resources must be made available to veterans, their families, and the general public.
  4. Holistic Care Models: Veteran care must incorporate holistic and integrative approaches, including mindfulness, nutrition, and community support, alongside psychedelic treatments. These support systems are vital for sustaining mental health and can multiply the therapeutic effects of psychedelics.
  5. Veteran-Centric Programs: Programs tailored specifically to veterans’ unique experiences and needs should be developed. Peer support systems, where veterans can share their experiences and support one another through healing, can enhance recovery outcomes.

The Role of Community

Community plays a pivotal role in healing. As a nation, we must foster environments that not only support veterans but actively engage them in the healing process. Community centers focused on veteran well-being, alongside integration programs that help veterans transition back into civilian life with purpose and support, can be transformative.

The Moral Imperative

As we commemorate Memorial Day, we must also reflect on our moral duty to those who have served. The veteran mental health crisis is a call to action—an opportunity not only to acknowledge the sacrifices of our military personnel but to invest in their healing and well-being. Psychedelic treatments represent a beacon of hope, backed by rigorous science and positive outcomes. It is essential for us to come together as a society, to push for changes that reflect our commitment to caring for veterans in the most effective and compassionate ways possible.

Conclusion

The journey to mental health recovery for veterans is not an easy one, but it is a journey we must undertake collectively. By embracing innovation and fostering an environment of openness and support, we can lead the way in addressing the mental health crisis that afflicts our veterans. The time to act is now. With courage, compassion, and collaboration, we can chart a course toward healing and honor the legacy of those who have served with dignity and responsibility.

In the spirit of unity and progress, let us stand together to advocate for effective solutions and a brighter future for all veterans. Their healing is our mission. Let us not falter in this duty.


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Image Credit: Microsoft CoPilot

Content Authenticity Statement: Most of the paragraphs in the article were created with the help of OpenAI Playground.

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What Will Happen if You Disappear?

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What Will Happen if You Disappear?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you were out of the office for a month and did not check email or check in, how would things go?

Your Team – Would your team curl up into a ball under the pressure, or would they use their judgement when things don’t go as planned? I think the answer depends on how you interacted with them over the last year. If you created an environment where it’s a genius and a thousand helpers, they won’t make any decisions because you made it clear that it’s your responsibility to make decisions and it’s their responsibility to listen. But if over the last year you demanded that they use their judgement, they’ll use it when you’re gone. Which would they do? How sure are you? And, how do you feel about that?

Other Teams – Would other teams reach out to your team for help, or would they wait until you get back to ask for help? If they wait it’s because they know you make all the decisions and your team is voice actuated – you talk and they act. But if other teams reach out directly to your team, it’s because over the last years you demonstrated to your team that you expect them to use their good judgement and make good decisions. Would other teams reach out for help or would they wait for you to get back? How do you feel about that?

Your Boss – Would your boss dive into the details of the team’s work or leave the work to the team? I think it depends on whether you were transparent with your boss over the last years about the team’s capability. If in your interactions you took credit for all the good work and blamed your team for the work that went poorly, your boss will dig into the details with your team. Your boss trusts you to do good work and not your team, and since you’re not there, your boss will think the work is in jeopardy and will set up meetings with your team to make sure the work goes well. But if over the last years you gave credit to the team and communicated the strengths and weaknesses of the team, your boss will let the team do the work. Would your boss set up the meetings or leave your team to their work? How sure are you?

To celebrate my son’s graduation from engineering school, I am taking a month off from work to ride motorcycles with him. I’m not sure how it will go with my team, the other teams and my boss, but over the last several years I’ve been getting everyone ready for just this type of thing.

Image credit: Pexels

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Better Customer Experiences Without Customer Feedback

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Learning from Customer Complaints – Even When They Don’t Tell You

Better Customer Experiences Without Customer Feedback

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

How would you like to know what made a customer angry or sad, leading them to leave a negative review? You might say, “I’ll just ask them,” and that’s a great answer. Direct feedback is a gift. But maybe there’s another way.

I had a sit-down with Michael Podolsky, the CEO of PissedConsumer.com, a sounding board for consumers to leave comments and reviews when they can’t get the customer service they want or deserve. In our Amazing Business Radio interview, he suggested that a proactive approach to handling complaints is more than just meeting with your team to discuss what you’re hearing from customers or what you think makes them unhappy. Take the guesswork out of it. Short of direct feedback, which in my opinion is still the best way to learn if your customers love you (or not), read competitor reviews on their websites or in the B2B world and partake in industry forums to find out what customers are saying about the companies they do business with.

Shep Hyken Customer Complaints Cartoon

In addition to looking at competitors’ websites and industry forums, monitor social channels for mentions of your competitors. While most companies practice “social listening” for their own brands, paying attention to social mentions about your competition gives you a broader insight into what’s happening in your industry.

Based on what you learn, create a Complaint Prevention Checklist. For example, if customers frequently complain about long hold times when calling your competition’s customer support, examine your company’s response time. If customers are frustrated by your competition’s complicated return policies, make sure you aren’t guilty of the same.

This isn’t a “do it once” exercise. Take time each quarter – maybe even each month – to examine this type of feedback. Share insights with your team and use them to stay customer-focused and ahead of your competition. Recognize that there are two areas in which you want to compete: providing a better customer experience and having fewer complaints. In a perfect world, you would have no complaints.

In my book, I’ll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again, one of the six strategies I cover in the final chapter is to find out what your competition does well and adapt it to your company. Don’t copy, but use their ideas for inspiration to make it your own. And if you pay attention to Podolsky’s advice, you’ll also want to find out what your competition isn’t doing well. Of course, you’ll want to determine if your organization is guilty of the same behaviors or operational snafus and proactively seek to eliminate or mitigate the problems.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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Benchmarking Innovation Performance

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Closing the Gap Between Aspiration and Execution

Benchmarking Innovation Performance

GUEST POST from Noel Sobelman

In today’s volatile, technology-driven world, where the pace of change continues to accelerate, most executive teams agree on one thing: innovation, whether incremental, adjacent, or transformative, is critical. What’s far less clear is how to measure whether their innovation efforts are working or how to systematically improve them. That’s where benchmarking comes in.

Benchmarking isn’t just a diagnostic tool, it’s a strategic accelerator. It provides clarity where there’s ambiguity, reveals blind spots that internal reviews often miss, and equips leadership teams with hard data to make smarter, faster, and more confident decisions about innovation investments and process improvements.

This article explores benchmarking as a strategic capability for quantifying the gap between current innovation performance and best-in-class execution. It also outlines how companies can use benchmarking to unlock more reliable, scalable, and profitable innovation outcomes.

From Insight to Action: Why Benchmark Innovation?

Innovation is inherently risky with outcomes that are hard to predict, but the processes that support it don’t have to be. Effective innovation systems are structured, repeatable, measurable, and continuously improving. Benchmarking enables companies to see those systems clearly and objectively. It replaces assumptions with insight and turns performance anecdotes into verifiable data.

Used strategically, benchmarking helps executive teams build a compelling case for change grounded in facts rather than opinions. It offers a concrete way to quantify gaps between current and desired performance, helping to expose where process inefficiencies or capability gaps are holding the organization back. Benchmarking also supports leadership in identifying maturity levels across critical innovation capabilities, from governance and investment decision-making to resource management and project execution.

Importantly, it links development capabilities directly to measurable business outcomes. That means innovation isn’t just about creativity or culture, it’s about performance that can be tracked, improved, and scaled. By grounding decisions in comparative data, benchmarking makes it easier to align managers around realistic year-over-year improvement targets that are both ambitious and realistic.

Defining Performance: What Benchmarking Measures

For benchmarking to drive real improvement, it must look at the right dimensions of performance. At Accel, we use a multi-dimensional benchmarking model that examines four distinct categories of innovation performance: innovation effectiveness, project performance, process application, and portfolio management.

Innovation effectiveness reflects senior leadership’s ability to guide success across the full innovation spectrum, from product line extensions to transformative new ventures. This includes new product vitality, the percentage of revenue generated by recent launches, as well as return on R&D investment and the proportion of spend lost due to delayed or ineffective decision-making (aka, wasted development spending). When measuring leadership effectiveness in creating new sources of growth beyond the core business, we include leading indicators like evidence-based portfolio metrics, progress metrics, and scaling metrics such as user engagement, retention rate, and referral rate.

Innovation project performance reflects how well teams execute against their objectives. It includes metrics such as time-to-market, time-to-profitability, and schedule predictability, alongside actual-to-planned measures of product cost, profitability, and quality. These indicators help determine whether teams are executing effectively while meeting the business and customer needs they set out to address. New venture project performance measures include validated assumptions and cumulative evidence strength across solution desirability, business viability, and technical feasibility dimensions.

Innovation process application focuses on how consistently and effectively innovation methodologies are applied. Here, we assess actual versus estimated project cycle times across development phases as well as the accuracy of development cost forecasts. We also examine the frequency of project re-scoping, exception reviews, team turnover, and the reuse of design or code elements, all of which serve as indicators of process health. For transformative innovation processes, we also assess learning velocity, experimentation rigor, evidence-based decision-making, metered funding practices, core business leverage, and engagement with external ecosystems.

Finally, innovation portfolio management metrics reveal how well an organization aligns its innovation resources with its strategy. We evaluate factors such as strategic alignment, investment allocation, resource utilization, and portfolio value realization. When these are off-target, companies often see a mismatch between growth ambition and investment mix, poor development throughput, or low return on their innovation spend.

Accel Management Group innovation performance benchmark metrics

Figure 1. Innovation Performance Benchmark Metrics

Together, these four categories offer a comprehensive view of performance and their connection to business outcomes, and more importantly, a roadmap for targeted, results-driven improvement.

How It Works: Accel’s Benchmarking Approach

The benchmarking process begins by establishing a clear, accurate picture of the company’s current state. This involves gathering available performance data, then evaluating it for consistency and comparability across sources. We reconcile discrepancies and normalize contextual factors like company size, product line complexity, regulatory classification, innovation type, and development methodology.

AI accelerates this process by enabling faster data harmonization, natural language processing to analyze qualitative inputs (such as project postmortems or customer feedback), and machine learning algorithms that detect hidden drivers of performance variance across projects, teams, or business units.

Once we’ve built this baseline, we assess capability maturity across several critical dimensions. These include innovation process structure, governance and decision-making frameworks, execution models (such as gated, Agile, or transformative approaches), and portfolio management practices. We also analyze resource management, discovery and ideation, new venture incubation efforts, alignment with business strategy, culture, and organizational mechanisms such as incentives and reward systems.

From there, we compare the organization’s practices and outcomes against peer companies, industry leaders, and Accel’s leading practice reference model. The output isn’t just a list of issues; it’s a prioritized set of capability gaps linked directly to performance impact. We then work with executive teams to develop action plans and change roadmaps, aligning leadership around where to invest, where to restructure, and where to accelerate change.

Noel Sobelman benchmarking approach

Figure 2. Benchmarking Approach

What Benchmarking Reveals: A Snapshot from the Field

We’ve seen across multiple clients and industries how benchmarking can uncover hidden obstacles to innovation performance. Consider the example of one of our clients, a MedTech manufacturer that decided to benchmark their capabilities after struggling with missed launch dates and underwhelming innovation returns. Their leadership team believed that product complexity and regulatory challenges were the root cause. But when we dug into the data, a different picture emerged.

The company was not consistently tracking core new product development performance metrics, making it difficult to identify root issues or assess improvement opportunities. Sample project data revealed that early-phase development cycles, specifically Concept and Planning Phases, were taking two to three times longer than industry benchmarks. Moreover, the company was investing heavily in detailed design before evaluating technical feasibility or validating customer requirements, which led to protracted development timelines, late-stage surprises, compliance-driven rework, and chronic cost overruns.

Our assessment also uncovered a lack of system-level architecture discipline and siloed project planning without proper integration to balance customer needs against technical, market window, schedule, and resource considerations. In short, while the organization believed it had a process problem, benchmarking revealed a deeper issue: a maturity gap in early-phase project planning, risk management, and system design.

By framing these insights within industry benchmarks and leading practices, the company was able to galvanize leadership support for a targeted transformation. The result was a realigned innovation and portfolio management process focused on early project de-risking, customer need validation, and robust front-end planning, leading to faster cycle times, fewer late-stage surprises, and improved innovation throughput.

Why It Matters: The Strategic Case for Benchmarking

Benchmarking delivers more than operational insights, it unlocks real business value. Companies that benchmark and act on the findings tend to outperform peers in key areas. For instance, best-in-class organizations generate over 45 percent of their revenue from new products. Their time-to-market is over 40 percent faster, and their R&D resources are more efficiently allocated toward high-impact initiatives like platform innovation and next-generation solutions.

In contrast, companies that don’t benchmark often lack visibility into why projects fail, where delays originate, or how resources are being utilized. This results in lower returns on innovation investment, lower project success rates, and internal misalignment on where and how to improve. We’ve seen cases where products missed their mark not because the core idea was flawed, but because teams moved too quickly into development without validating customer needs or failed to adapt to shifting customer expectations. The result: products that launched late, didn’t resonate with customers, or had to be reworked at a significant cost.

When benchmarking is integrated into an ongoing performance management system, it serves as a feedback loop, continuously guiding decision-making and capability development. That’s why it’s not just a one-time diagnostic, but a strategic discipline that supports innovation as a competitive advantage. AI technologies enhance this feedback loop by transforming benchmarking into a dynamic, continuous process, automatically updating benchmarks as internal and external data sources evolve, and alerting teams to emerging gaps or opportunities in real time.

Conclusion: A Tool for Strategic Transformation

In a world where innovation separates leaders from followers, benchmarking is more than a diagnostic, it’s a tool for strategic transformation. By providing hard data on where you stand and where to focus, it turns vague aspirations into actionable priorities and ensures that innovation efforts are aligned with measurable business outcomes.

But benchmarking only delivers value when it’s integrated into the broader innovation system, driving continuous improvement and sharper execution over time. That’s where its real power lies, as an ongoing discipline that builds organizational maturity and long-term advantage.

For executive teams looking to sharpen their innovation capability, a few critical questions should guide the next steps:

  • Do we have an objective understanding of how our innovation performance stacks up against peers?
  • Are our development processes delivering the speed, quality, predictability, and customer impact we need?
  • Can we clearly measure how innovation contributes to growth and profitability?
  • Most importantly, are we investing in the right capabilities to win in the future?

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and you can’t lead if you don’t know where you stand.

Image credits: Accel Management Group, Noel Sobelman, Pexels

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