Leadership & Business

Are You An Idea Killer?

My new Inc. column, entitled Beware of the Idea Killers is out and focuses on how new ideas are what will help your business remain competitive. However, be sure you aren't killing them before you consider bringing them to fruition.

As Innovation remains a hot topic in 2008 and as executive teams continue struggling to build effective, sustainable, and measurable innovation programs. The battleground becomes how to structure innovation departments, drive company-wide innovation initiatives, and sustain efforts over the long haul.

To help executives with these challenges my company, Breakthrough Management Group (BMG) is hosting a 2-day Executive Seminar February 25-26 in Denver, CO, entitled Chief Innovation Officer: Lead Your Company’s Growth and Innovation Efforts.

This is the third CIO course for BMG.  We hosted two similar events in 2007, each time heralding attendees from industries as diverse as healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and financial services into one room to discuss and learn about what they all have in common – the need to better drive growth and innovation in order to compete in the future. Past attendees include, Levi Strauss, AVNET, Circuit City, NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation and GE Energy to name a few.

If you are interested in Innovation and what it really takes to lead your company to the forefront, I highly recommend this course. More information can be found here.

It’s Time to Stop Messing Around

Performance Excellence is poised to become more and more important at your company—or it’s not. Investment in better processes is key to executing your company’s growth strategy, or it’s key to ensuring your company survives a downturn, or it’s key to…something else. Anyway, I’m sure it’s key.

What I’m saying is that the ability to drive growth and reduce cost by simply picking up the low-hanging (or ground) fruit is coming to an end. That’s because there’s just not much fruit left on the ground, anymore than there’s much oil or copper or silver left in the ground. Low hanging fruit as a cheap commodity is running out. So we have to start figuring out how to make our way up the tree to the other fruit that’s up there…somewhere.

Creative Destruction

Creative Destruction – words most often associated with today’s world of newly intensified innovation. A term first coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1940s, it’s only in much more recent years that business leaders have come to understand its wisdom.

Nowhere is this understanding more clear than in the recent appointment of Robert Nardelli to the helm of Chrysler. Amid a great deal of criticism over his tenure at Home Depot, Nardelli appears to be a perfect choice for Chrysler.

Most experts agree that Chrysler will need to excel on many fronts: a razor-sharp discipline, a take-no-prisoner’s attitude toward cost cutting and a genuine willingness to destroy before recreating will be at the forefront. While many people have accused Nardelli of destroying the culture at Home Depot – much as they’ve accused James McNerney of destroying the innovation culture at 3M – I would argue that perhaps neither destroyed too much of anything in their first forays outside of GE. In fact, they may not have destroyed enough, or done their destroying creatively enough, and they were replaced before they could meet their boards’ high expectations. Then again, neither of them had a predecessor like Jack Welch, who’s own predecessor left him behind instructions to “blow it up.”

Innovation and Improvement: A Distinction Without a Difference

My newest column is up on Inc.com. It talks about how the processes of innovation and improvement are much more intertwined then we generally like to believe.

I would be interested in your comments and thoughts on the subject.

My company is now offering a new and "innovative training course", the first of its kind...Innovation Tools for Black Belts.  Held in Denver, CO Oct. 8-12, this course is specifically designed for Six Sigma and Lean practitioners, the class teaches a number of powerful Innovation tools in the context of BMG's Structured Innovation methodology, D4.

A five-day course, attendees have the opportunity to work on a real business issue with guidance from BMG’s innovation experts; teaching participants a solid, repeatable and predictable process for innovating new products, processes and business models. The first course will be taught by Dr. Phil Samuel, my co-faculty for BMG's upcoming Chief Innovation Officer seminar to be held in Denver, CO  Oct. 1-2, 2007.

I highly recommend it so check both courses out!

My New Article in Inc. - Either-Or Thinking Doesn't Work and Other Things..

My new article Either-Or Thinking Doesn't Work is now posted on Inc.com. It's about how Operational efficiency and creativity both play a part in business success. Let me know what you think.

I will also be facilitating a second Chief Innovation Officer Executive Education Course on October 1-2, 2007 in Denver, CO.  Chief Innovation Officer – Leading Your Company’s Growth and Innovation Initiatives. This program is specifically designed for business leaders who are leading the charge for growth and innovation inside their organizations. This is very dynamic and engaging course, I encourage you to check it out at CIO Course.

The Chief Innovation Officer

This week I participated in a first of its kind course titled, “The Chief Innovation Officer.”

It’s a course that was designed to meet a very specific and rapidly growing need.  And in fact many of the course participants noted that they had been searching for some time to find a course just like it.

Anyone reading this blog already knows the statistics.  A bazillion percent of CEOs say innovation is their top priority; IBM, Booz Allen, and others have launched innovation practices; business magazines are writing about innovation every week; and “best practices in innovation” conferences are popping up everywhere.  And, companies are assigning top executives responsibility for their innovation efforts.

But, despite all the attention (and hype) few companies—or people—really understand what it (innovation) really means.  I’ve run into people at conferences that say to me, “if I just pick up one golden nugget—one best practice—that I can take home with me, I’ll consider this conference to be a great success.  My response:  “wow, you don’t really value two days of your time very much, do you?”

So the faculty for the course:  Dr. Phil Samuel of Breakthrough Management Group, Cheryl Perkins, of the Innovation Edge, Robert Tucker of the Innovation Resource Center, and myself (of course) set out to design a course that would truly teach people what they needed to know to become their companies Chief Innovation Officer, whether they carry the title or not.  The intent was that 100% of the two days be filled with valuable insights and that instead of going home with a golden nugget, the attendees leave with a full treasure chest.

And that’s just what happened.  In the words of one participant, an Executive Vice President for a $16B company, “ . . .reflecting on the last 2 days. It may very well be that you just held the best session I have ever attended.”

Sentiment from others was similar.  Participants came from major healthcare organizations (boy can we use some innovation there), large distributors of products from cars to semiconductors, the paper industry and large insurance companies.  One participant, when asked what he would do when he left answered by saying, “ask my CEO to change my title to Chief Innovation Officer.”

The next "Chief Innovation Course" will be held on October 1-2, 2007 in Denver, CO.

My hope is that we’ve started to bring some clarity to an otherwise murky area of business—because the success of business in the United States depends on it.

I’ll let you know . . .

The Emerging Role of the New CIO

Search Amazon.com on the word “innovation” and more than 180,000 books come back. Search Time magazine and you get nearly 3,000 results. There’s no doubt innovation is a hot topic. Other evidence comes in the form of the many surveys that have been done by IBM, McKinsey, Deloitte, etc. In one survey by Boston Consulting Group, 81% of CEOs listed innovation as one of their top three priorities.

So what’s being done about it? How are CEOs satisfying the demand they’ve created by jumping on the innovation band wagon and telling their boards and CEOs that they’re focused on innovation? They’re doing what they’ve always done. They’re delegating. How do I know? Just look at the number of companies that have created the new position of CIO (Chief Innovation Officer) in recent years. It’s a trend that’s all too familiar. Back in the 70s and 80s it was the CFO—a response to the increasing financial complexity of business. In the 90s it was the first generation of CIO (the Chief Information Officers) followed by the CTO (Chief Technology Officer). Five years ago, in response to the Enron debacle, it was the CRO (Chief Risk Officer)—and in some cases, another CEO (Chief Ethics Officer). Well, today it’s the Chief Innovation Officer.

So what does a Chief Innovation Officer do? That’s a great question. In a BusinessWeek book review this week, Michael Arndt, without realizing it, alludes to the problem that most CIOs don’t know what to do—at least not yet. He comments on a new book from the Harvard Business School Press by two BCG consultants. The books is titled, Payback, by James P. Andrew and Harold L. Sirken, Arndt points out, all too well, that what the book lacks are the “how-to” instructions needed to successfully build innovation into a business plan. Once again we have high-level fluff. The gist of the book—you need to ensure your innovation efforts are profitable—is just too simplistic and is simply a restatement of countless books of yesteryear put in the context of innovation instead of re-engineering, mergers and acquisitions, or any other “new” effort to improve business. Which business improvement efforts don’t require a measurable payback?

I run into a lot of CIOs these days. They don’t all explicitly have that title—they might be VPs of R&D, SVPs of Corporate Strategy, or Directors of Sales, Marketing and Innovation—but they all have the same objectives. They’ve been tasked—delegated to by their CEO—with figuring out how to drive innovation in their company. After all, the CEOs must keep their promises to their board and shareholders. Most of them are doing a lot of reading, attending conferences, and possibly reading an occasional blog. And most of them are as confused and lost as ever, because of books like Payback.

That’s why I’ve set out to help them, by creating a program that actually teaches them how to do their job. We start with simple things, like writing a job description for themselves. And then we set to the task of actually teaching them how to execute on each element of that job description.

It’s a pretty simple concept, but one that seems long overdue.

TRIZ Continues to Take Root

Last week I was interviewed by Innovation Tools’ Chuck Frey about INsourcing Innovation, and how TRIZ can be used to provide structure and direction to a company’s innovation initiatives.

If you’re interested in reading the full interview, you can find it here

Lessons Learned in 2006

Last month Chuck Frey of Innovation Tools asked innovators from around the world: “What is the most important lesson you learned regarding innovation during 2006?" I answered with the following reflection:

THE BALANCED BRAIN APPROACH TO INNOVATION

The big learning for me in 2006, after several years of working with clients on the adoption of different approaches to innovation, is that innovation is not "the next thing you do." Rather, "it is about everything that you do.

While the train has been coming for some time, I felt a little like we were "pushing innovation" and that it wasn't naturally fitting into my clients' businesses. I finally realized that we didn't need to change what we do, but instead we needed to incorporate innovation into everything that we already do.

I also came to realize that while we were very focused on innovation methodologies, we weren't spending enough time focusing on activation of the right side of the brain, resulting more of a whole-brain kind of approach to decision making in business. We've changed all that and now we're trying to help others achieve balance between the right and left side of the brain, because we think the market is at risk of letting the pendulum swing as far right as it swung left during the era of continuous improvement.

You see, continuous improvement, process excellence, call it what you may, has gone too far in teaching us that all we need is the left side of our brain to be effective; that's simply not true. Whether taking a methodical, data driven approach to things, or applying years of experience and intuition, we need a well-balanced application of our cognitive powers to achieve optimal results.

Chuck’s complete list of lessons learned can be found here.

Talking About Ambidextrous Organizations

Earlier this month, Dan Keldsen of The Delphi Group and I set aside some time to talk about INsourcing Innovation, and the performance excellence tools a company can use to become a really outstanding organization.

Feel free to listen in here.