The best companies are expected to model, if not to develop themselves, innovative new management practices. This expectation is known as the ‘institutional norm of progress’, and companies that use new and improvement management practices are said to be displaying ‘progressiveness’. A study by a team of researchers from the Rotterdam School of Management, Queensland […]
Read More… from The Symbolic Value of New Management Practices
To foster innovation, the first step is to recognize the difference between business thinking and innovative thinking. Business thinking is logical, builds on past precedents and pursues certainty. Innovation thinking is intuitive, revels in ambiguity, and favours slow reflection over quick decisions. Leaders in innovative companies are adept at both business thinking and innovative thinking. […]
Read More… from Three Building Blocks of Innovation Leadership
Whether developing new products or services, refining internal processes, or creating disruptive business models, innovation is the key to sustained competitive advantage. Many companies, however, are unable to meet their innovation goals. In a recent Center for Creative Leadership white paper, authors David Magellan Horth and Jonathan Vehar cite a survey of 500 leaders in […]
Read More… from Innovation Leaders Turn Creative Ideas Into Action
The digital age creates a wide range of new opportunities for innovation. Examples include new marketing outlets through social media; ‘big data’ information on customers and the market; mobile devices that connect companies to customers 24/7; and apps that redefine business models. However, not all C-suite executives have a digital mindset. As a result, innovation […]
Read More… from CIOs: Coach and Communicate with C-suite for Digital Innovation
To make decisions, leaders must understand, to use the vernacular, ‘what is happening’. They must make sense of the events and situations that impact their areas of responsibility; this sense-making not only involves the past and present, but also the future: what is likely to happen. In July of 2005, an innocent man commuting to […]
Read More… from Bad Framing Leads to Bad Decisions and Bad (Even Fatal) Actions
According to Jim Johnson of University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, the major demographic trends transforming America today are unprecedented — so unprecedented that he calls these trends “disruptive demographics.” Based on on-going analyses of statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor, Internal Revenue Service and other governmental agencies, Johnson, who is […]
Read More… from Six Disruptive Demographic Trends and What They Mean for the Workplace
Uncertainty — such as a coming organizational restructuring, a new CEO brought in to turn around the company, a competitor’s new product or new technology that could derail the company’s market position, an impending sale or merger — can represent a threat or an opportunity. The immediate response to uncertainty usually involves 1) finding more […]
Why are some people more open to change and others instinctively resistant to anything that significantly alters the status quo? The key is often in an individual’s basic attitude toward change. Some people will default to an unfavourable, negative attitude toward change that leads to resistance, while others have within them a favourable positive attitude […]
Read More… from What is the Psychology Behind Resistance to Change?
Around 20 years ago, academics and consultants Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema identified three ‘value disciplines’ or models followed by top-performing companies: operational excellence, customer-intimacy and product leadership. The second, essentially an advanced form of customer-centricity, is usually the one that’s hardest to emulate. One of the difficulties with the customer-intimacy model is that it […]
“Strategy is often like desert rain. Before the raindrops leave the desert floor, they evaporate, creating little or no effect below” — George Labovitz and Victor Rosansky, The Power of Alignment (Wiley, 1997). Failure rates for strategy execution are notoriously high: estimates by academics and consultants range from 40 to 90%. It’s no surprise, then, that […]
