Monthly Archives: April 2010
I’m going old-school with today’s message – it’s going to be direct, and to the point… focus on performance. One of my pet peeves is the voluminous amount of management speak and self-help propaganda currently in circulation designed to codify a lack of performance. I’m an individual that believes in clear and direct communication, so I’ll spare you the rhetoric and just do what I do best… cut to the chase. Put simply, the formula for success, what truly differentiates you, is that you either PERFORM or your don’t.The text that follows is not going to nurture you, nor will it serve as a disingenuous pat on the back. I’m not going to tell you what a nice person you are, but I am going to ask you to lose the excuses, rationalizations, justifications, platitudes, theories, and spin and just get the job done. This message is about zeroing-in on … Continue reading
Innovation in Social NetworkingThis is the fourth of several ‘Innovation Perspectives’ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘What is the role of social media in innovation? (Either inside or outside the organization)’. Here is the next perspective in the series:by Bob PrestonWhat comes to mind when I think of social networking is the typical idle gossip and tidbits of information from friends and family for personal updates on “what are you doing now?” Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube… We all know them for fun personal and individual social news which spreads faster than wildfire. Beyond the personal use of social networking, however, organizations in many industries are using social networking sites and tools for collaborating with stakeholders, ultimately driving business value and innovation.The use of social networking allows organizations to reach mass markets quickly, creating web 2.0 communities of stakeholders for viral word … Continue reading
“How do you break down internal silos in order to improve at innovation? Open innovation – or any kind of innovation – suffers with silos. What are your insights and experiences on this issue?”I posted these questions in the 15inno by Stefan Lindegaard group on LinkedIn about a month ago. We got 28 comments with lots of great advice. (Click on Discussions in the group if you want to read this). I have been looking through these comments a couple of times as I wanted to write a blog posts with an excerpt on this.This has not yet happened and one reason is that I have begun thinking differently about silos and their impact on innovation.Perhaps we do not have to break down silos to drive more innovation. Perhaps we should just accept the silos and work around the issues they can create on innovation. Perhaps open innovation will change … Continue reading
And what you may not know about crowdsourcingby Idris MooteeInnovation is hard. It is not about getting the idea at all, it is about managing ideas. So you’ve have a few great ideas, so what? There is a lot of art and science behind moving ideas along corporate decision chain as well as in managing the unknowns. I remember I used to teach an in-house program for my strategists on “managing the unknowns.” These MBAs would struggle with not finding enough data points and get stuck in the innovation process. How often do these big world-changing ideas come from people with MBAs?But then there are so many ideas such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, OnStar, Kindle, Blackberry and the X-37B space plane launched this week… that turned into innovations that change the way we work and play forever, stirred new competition, and created new wealth. The future is never about the … Continue reading
There is lots written about how hard/challenging/difficult transformation/change/innovation are in companies – the bigger the more difficult – but there are two key issues which don’t get raised enough (in my view).Hard decisions and transparencyFirst – hard decisions. A couple of years ago I attended a Financial Times Innovate conference in London. The speaker that stood out was Syl Saller – the Innovation Director at Diageo (it owns Guiness, Baileys, Smirnoff etc) and her honest insights into innovation and change in global companies. Syl described a series of key meetings about what they were going to invest in to support the growth of new global brands and what they needed to stop in certain countries where investments were being made in local brands. The (relatively) easy bit was where to invest – the (really) hard bit was agreeing on what to stop.Being a big company metrics drive behaviour so country … Continue reading
This is the third of several ‘Innovation Perspectives’ articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on ‘What is the role of social media in innovation? (Either inside or outside the organization)’. Here is the next perspective in the series:by Michael SoerensenUse the power of the Social Media “teens” in your organization!Everybody is struggling with innovation collaboration – especially how to make employees, customers, etc. chip in… One way of bypassing this for good, is to identify the savvy social media experts within your company, and equip them with tools for innovation and ideation. And you don’t need to search for long – just call your Human Resource (HR) department and get a list of employees under 30 years of age, and you will have instant access to specialists brought up on facebook, messenger, linkedin, myspace, etc.!This group knows what works – and what doesn’t … Continue reading
