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Innovation: Paint a Picture of the End Game
Innovation begins with collaboration.
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The Importance of Experimenting
A successful experiment is any that helps you understand and shape your hypothesis.
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Innovative Teams: The Four Personality Styles You Need to Have
Innovation is a collaborative process that requires different personalities at each step: analytic people to define the challenge, creative people to generate solutions, people who plan and execute to get things done, and emotional people to manage the change.
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Innovation: Staying One Step Ahead of Your Competition
Innovation isn’t about new products, new processes, or new business models. It’s about adaptability and nimbleness. It’s about staying one step ahead of the competition. Innovation is not an event. It’s a repeatable, predictable, sustainable process.
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The Knowing-Doing Gap
Leaders should both know and do.
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Execute Or Be Executed
The best strategy is nothing without the ability to execute. Grattan Kirk explains what it takes to deliver on strategy from the top down.
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Why Organizations Fail to Execute on Their Strategy
We think about goals and people with different parts of the brain. Thinking about one shuts off access to the other. Thus, leaders tend to focus on goals and ignore the implications of those goals for the people who are asked to achieve them.
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The Link Between Business and Workforce Strategies
Businesses have business strategies but not workforce strategies. The workforce strategy identifies the workers needed to implement the business strategy.
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The Three Elements of a Great Execution
A manager can be a brilliant strategist but not get things done; the world pays for results, not brilliant thinking.
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Find Possibilities, Then Execute
Dan Glaser asked his managers to pursue possibilities, not probabilities. Possibilities leave the future open to be created, the landscape to be defined by wide-open opportunity.
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Judgment and Creativity
Freedom from judgment is important at the beginning of the creative process. People who brainstorm understand this. But at some point the tree must be pruned in order to move from openness to closure. That requires judgment.
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What Leaders Can Learn from Athletes
Unlike most managers, athletes prepare mentally, emotionally, and technically. Mental preparation includes visualizing what to do in different situations.
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Aligning Decisions
Laree Kiely discusses the importance of aligning decisions with the overall organizational strategy.
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Risk Taking Is Disruptive
There is a disconnect between a desire to innovate and the innovation process. You can’t scale down when you take risks; you need capacity and capability. Leaders should model risk taking and reward risk takers. Leaders should know how they show up in the world.
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Defining Progress
A vision without action is a dream. Doing is action; action is progress. Make sure your innovation projects don’t succumb to dream status.
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Inspire Innovation Progress
Grow your innovation toolkit by adding these tips to inspire creative progress.
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Innovation Agenda
Creating an innovation agenda is just the tool you need to quickly clarify the often complex decision of where to start and how to get started on a project.
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Integrated Leadership
Is it possible to have both a successful business and personal life? According to William George it is, but there are trade-offs to be made.
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Strategic Thinking in Tactical Times
Joe DiVanna had a diverse group of 30 people write a 45,000-word book on strategy in 24 hours.
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Driving Strategic Change Through Successful Project Management
Execute your strategy in a series of projects while it's being developed.
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Cautionary Tales for the New World Manager
Plan in reverse; decide where you want to be, then plan backwards to see how to get there.
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Self-Motivation through Interrogative Self Talk
When we are trying to motivate ourselves, we typically use positive self-talk. “I can do this!” A better approach is to use interrogative self-talk.
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Innovation means Execution
Tim Sanders discusses how true innovation also means execution of the ideas.
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Organizational DNA for Strategic Innovation
Strategic innovation requires organizational innovation or transformation in every respect — the organizational DNA.
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Creativity and Execution
Innovation is creativity multiplied by execution.
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The Greatest Enemy of Execution
The greatest single enemy of execution is complexity.
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The Power of Clear Direction
When asked to choose between growing revenue and renewing the technology base if push came to shove, a CEO told the entire company, “When in doubt, technology comes first.” The example demonstrates the power of clear direction.
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Setting Metrics for Innovation Programs
Metrics help calibrate your efforts and provide a clear path for remedy. Lisa Bodell gives examples of input, development, and output metrics. Metrics signal that innovations are welcome. Too many metrics, however, set handcuffs instead of guardrails.
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Wildcards
Ideas are rarely implemented according to plan. Use wildcards to help your team adjust to unexpected changes. Give them ten minutes to plan something, but pull a wildcard after seven: no money, no time, a market shift, etc. New constraints encourage innovation.
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Proctor & Gamble: A Major Transformation
Proctor & Gamble simplified an inefficient matrix organization to one that placed equal emphasis on maximizing profits, increasing sales, and reducing costs. The new organization succeeded because it encouraged people in different areas to work with each other.
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Instinct, Debate & Data Make The Best Decisions
To make wise decisions, you need to consider several factors. Gavin Patterson describes those factors and helps leaders see how to incorporate them in their decision-making process.
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Setting The Tone For Customer Advocacy
Customer advocacy cannot be the responsibility of the CCO alone. As Jeb Dasteel shares, every person in an organization must believe and participate in customer service to create a successful culture of wooing clients.
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The Importance Of Balancing Strategy & Operations
Every team needs a good balance of experience and abilities in order to be successful in the long term. Don Vanthournout highlights how strategy and operations work together.
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Delivering Financial Data Promptly
Believing the impossible is possible, Ulf Lilja shares how Sony Ericsson implemented a one-day close.
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Overview: Blue Ocean Strategy
Blue Ocean is a strategy to move from the red ocean of bloody competition to uncontested market space.
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The Golden Circle: The Three Essential Elements of Organizational Success
Three concentric circles are WHAT we do, HOW we do it, and WHY, with WHY in the center, and HOW on the outside.
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From Tactics to Strategy
First, make sure you have great reporting. You need a dashboard and exceptions. Others need to look at everything; you don’t. Then worry less about efficiency and more about effectiveness — less about what and more about why. Force-rank your priorities.
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The Other 95 Percent of Innovation
With incremental innovation, organizations make everything they do better.
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The ROI of Creating a People-Centric Leadership Model
Based on Stern Stewart economic value added (EVA) analysis, their annual shareholder value has grown 15 percent-plus since 1988. When you give people an inspiring vision, responsible freedom, and celebration along the way you get exception results.
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Where Executives Struggle in Innovation
Executives struggle in 1) setting the focus for innovation, e.g., twelve initiatives is too many; 2) setting the outcomes that define success; 3) insufficient attention and governance; not encouraging debate; and 4) too much attention to process.
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The Importance of 'Why' in Innovation
Incentives like recognition, working with a certain leader, and monetary rewards are associated with unsuccessful outcomes. What works is to explain why the innovation is needed. That builds trust and purpose, and commitment to reach the top of the mountain.
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Requirements for a Successful Innovation Team
First, clearly define the problem to be solved. Second, assemble the right mix of deep technical expertise. Third, the team needs resources, but not too many; they need to be experimenting and getting to the next level. Fourth, leaders should be engaged throughout.
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Innovation Often Isn't Innovative
Innovation has its fads—open innovation, business model innovation, etc.—and the fads usually don’t work. Leaders apply tools designed for other problems, like process maps and stage gates. Teams often change the idea to fit the process rather than the reverse.
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After You Complete an Orthodoxy Exercise
After you question some basic beliefs, you can focus on questions you should ask. Change your perception to be more creative. Use analogy brainstorming; how would Google attack this problem? How would constraints change your attack? Test as quickly as possible.
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Strategic Planning and Alignment
The business plan and strategic plan should be the same.