How to Ensure Your Innovation Message Hits Home

#innovationmandate Our family pet is a French bulldog. His name is Lucky. In their behavior, dogs of this breed are somewhat like houseplants: They don’t like to be too hot, too cold, or really too anything. They are known for range of common ailments, and as a result we spend an inordinate amount of time […]

How Maslow’s Hierarchy Relates to Innovation Leadership

#innovationmandate Words are things – Maya Angelou There is perhaps nothing I find more surprising than the fact that many leaders are incredibly careless about the way in which they use language, particularly when it comes to innovation and new ideas. In its most simple terms, if we want to inspire others we need to […]

How to Inspire Innovation By Making a Personal Connection

#innovationmandate[spacer height=”20px”] Ask the typical CEO if he or she is connected to the company’s top stakeholders—the executives, board members, big shareholders, and vendors—and they’re likely to reply, “Of course I’m connected to them! What a ridiculous question!” When you probe a little deeper, you may hear these additional explanations: “I have an open door […]

Innovation Leaders: Where Do You Fit In?

#innovationmandate We don’t make mistakes. We just have happy accidents – Bob Ross Not everyone who innovates—and makes a difference to peoples’ lives—is an entrepreneur or chief innovation officer of a high-tech company. Here’s a true story that showed me just one of the many aspects of human innovation. Once I was on vacation with […]

Innovation Leaders Earn the Respect of Their Employees and Peers

#innovationmandate Notice in the title I used the word “earn.” I did not say “deserve,” or “are entitled to,” or “should expect.” Any leader who struts around and expects to be respected just because of the nameplate on their door, or the view from their corner office, is making a big mistake. Innovation leaders earn […]

To Innovate Is to Adapt

#innovationmandate H.G. Wells once wrote: “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” The renowned science fiction author may have been talking about the future of humanity, but winning leaders understand exactly what he was saying.In business, change is the norm. You either adapt or perish. Adaptation is the fueling force of evolutionary […]

The Three Key Attributes of Innovation Leaders

#innovationmandate There are three key attributes that innovation leaders know and practice. They are Access, Action, and Authenticity. 1. Access When it comes to team engagement, providing access goes far beyond the so-called open-door policy. Having an “open door” means your innovation team members can enter your office when they want to, to ask a […]

Successful Innovators Seek Truth

#innovationmandate Today’s winning innovation leaders know the first step towards leveraging disruption is to recognize the world as it really is and not as they’d like it to be.They know that wishful thinking will put them on the road to disaster. I once had the tremendous honor of serving as the keynote speaker for the […]

BlackBerry Innovates, Falls, and Then Re-Invents Itself

#innovationmandate[spacer height=”20px”] For a thousand years, no man could run a mile in under four minutes. Everyone believed it could never be done. Then in 1954, Roger Bannister ran the mile in 3:59.4 minutes. At the time, this was astonishing. No one had ever run so fast! But the pace quickened. Since then, runners have […]

The Innovation Race Is Getting Faster and Tougher