Leadership

Brant Cooper discusses what innovation truly means and why so many organizations fail at it. It often means something different to varying members of the organization. It needs to be defined by the organization, then shared with everyone.

While “innovation” might be one method of achieving priorities and goals, having an innovation mindset is required no matter the pursuit. The innovation mindset is characterized by behavior reflecting learning and exploration. It’s how to deal with uncertainty.

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In this uncertain economy, businesses planning for the year ahead, will very likely include re-orgs. While re-organizing parts of the business might improve some efficiencies, it’s often disguising leadership problems rather than real productivity issues.

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The end result is a bias toward making people work harder, not smarter. If you’re looking for a true solution to more efficient workflow, then re-orgs should be thought of from the bottom-up, not top-down. Empower the bottom, so your organization can react to changes to its environment, which generally occur at the edge, not the center. Agile teams define work needed. New information is relayed to the top. Leadership alters strategy, communicates plans, and allocates resources.

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When you scale based upon functions, you are likely reinforcing silos. You end up cascading tasks that one hopes align with organizational priorities.

Mission-based organization of the company, rather than carving work up based upon function is more impactful. In the end, most teams will look the same, as if they were carved up by function, but only because the mission dictates that. In other words, if a team has a mission that requires building particular software product functionality, the team will likely be composed of all software developers. On the other hand, if a mission requires a team to investigate what functionality will increase customer engagement, functions other than developers would be required. Learn how Moves The Needle has helped companies with mission-based organization.

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The increased complexity and endless disruptions of the modern world brought on by the transition to the digital age means uncertainty is everywhere. All across our businesses, we face new challenges, as what used to work no longer achieves desired outcomes. The self-awareness of admitting what we don’t know is the first step toward figuring out new best practices. Fundamentally, people must act differently in the face of uncertainty. Businesses need to adopt learning strategies in order to improve, adapt, or even reinvent their execution strategies.

Wars, technological advances, the pandemic, social, and political turmoil have led to businesses facing disruption on an ongoing basis. As technology innovation has moved to the edge, technical risk is less problematic than market risk. The risk to business is less “can we build the product” than “should we?” Customer insights represent an important and vastly under-appreciated intellectual capital versus, say, patents. Businesses must be closer to the customer; understand them deeper. They must be able to respond to change. Overall, companies must be nimble and move fast.

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Disruption is happening, and we can’t stop it—it's part of the shift from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age. We can, however, learn and adapt in order to survive and thrive. We can do this by thinking like entrepreneurs, in other words, learning before executing. To behave in this way, however, requires new leadership skills and benefits from alternative organizational structure.

Brad D. Smith, Executive Chairman of the Board of Intuit, shares his lessons in leadership and the role of a CEO in nurturing innovation. He talks about developing a Founder's mindset, the importance of creating a learning environment where people treat success and failure the same way, and how to deliver the numbers today and reimagine the company for the future.

In this episode, we are joined by Michelle Brigman, Director of Customer Experience at 7-Eleven. Michelle shares how, in the face of the global pandemic, 7-Eleven quickly shifted to ensure their over 68,000 store owners and franchisees could continue to meet their customers’ needs. She also provides insight into 7-Eleven’s COVID19 Command Center and how they use this to rapidly collect and respond to insights gained from all parts of their business.

Learn how Roche Diabetes Care used Lean Innovation to reinvent themselves to better address disruptive forces in Diabetes Care.  Moritz Hartmann, head of the Roche Information Solutions shares his leadership lessons learned throughout this journey driving transformation in the highly regulated medical devices industry.

In this episode, we’re honored to have Bennett Blank, Innovation Leader at Intuit, talk about how Intuit has spread innovation thinking throughout the entire organization. Bennett is a Lean Startup in the Enterprise veteran so you’re in for a treat.

When trying to transform organizations to become more innovative, it’s easy to forget about the interpersonal side and get caught up in the process.

In today’s episode we dive into just that: how can you better understand your colleagues’ preferred styles of communication and leadership, so you can work together in a way that they’ll be most receptive.

The San Diego Food Bank strives to end hunger and serve over 370,000 individuals every month. Not too long ago they went through one of our Lean Innovation Bootcamps tailored for Non-Profit and Social Impact organizations.We discuss their results with Vanessa Moore and how they changed the way the organization functions when it comes to creating new value.