The Business of Innovation – The Responsibility Revolution

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Innovation is the introduction of new things or methods and is the life blood of business today. Innovative companies realize remarkable marketplace rewards. The challenge before leaders is how to inspire their workforce to use the full measure of their creative power to advance the organization in new and better ways.

The Business of Innovation is a five part series created by CNBC in association with IBM. Within each episode, Maria Bartiromo and a distinguished panel of guests discuss what it takes to be an innovation leader.

Share Your Financial Results and Improve Performance

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Should you share your firm’s financial results with this staff? This is one of the questions that business owners face every day, and all too often the answer is no.

But no is probably the wrong answer. An organization can very often improve performance and get its employees bought into it’s mission and purpose simply by sharing financial results with the employees.

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About the Author

Bill Hettinger, Ph.D. is an internationally known consultant, educator, and thought leader who has trained numerous students, business owners, and managers in finance, entrepreneurship and small-business creation.

His latest book is Finance Without Fear: A Guide to Creating and Managing a Profitable Business. Finance Without Fear is an easy to understand guide to finance that not only explains the key concepts of finance, but also explains what the numbers mean and how finance can be used to create a business with a competitive advantage. He can be contacted at [email protected]. To read Bill’s complete biography, click here.

Guardrails: Keep Your Projects Out of the Weeds

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StrategyDriven Strategic Planning ArticleThink about if there were no guardrails on the freeway. It would be all too easy to run off the road and find yourself hurt and way off the fast track to your end destination.

Business is a fast and zigzagging road – a road that needs guardrails to keep businesses and projects on track. On your road to success (whether it be to increase profits, become an industry leader, capture more market share, etc.), you need to establish your own guardrails so you do not drive your company or project into the weeds.

Establish Guardrails

I worked in several large companies during my corporate career, and I can’t tell you the number of pet projects that became my pet peeves. I saw literally millions and millions of dollars flow into projects that had no real metrics and timeline in place. In other words, these projects had no guardrails.

You can ensure that your projects don’t waste time or money by simply putting the correct boundaries in place. You must think, “this is what we’re trying to drive to and if we don’t get to it at this point, we’re going to go back to the drawing board to go after the next idea.”

Proper Boundaries

To establish proper boundaries, you must do the following:

  1. Identify the major steps (or zig zags) that will take you to your goal. Example: Zig #1: Drive to profitability – have product bring in $20K in revenue.
  2. Define when you have completed your zig zag. Example: We will have sold 15K units of product.
  3. Set a deadline to assess your team’s progress. Example:We will have sold 15K units of product and bring in $20K in revenue by April 2012, or we will go back to the drawing board.

Zigzagging to Success

Establishing guardrails is just one element of the entire Zig Zag Principle. I encourage you to be strategic and deliberate about the way you approach your business. It may seem counterintuitive, but zigzagging to your goal (rather than charging straight for it), with the correct guardrails in place, will lead you and your business to success.

About the Author

Rich Christiansen describes himself as ‘a perfectly good business executive, turned entrepreneur.’ Before becoming an entrepreneur, he was a skilled executive and market innovator in the corporate world. He was General Manager at both Mitsubishi Electric and About.com. After 20 years in the technology industry, he discovered that his true passion and talent is in launching start-up companies.

Rich has founded or co-founded 32 businesses. These ventures were bootstrapped with just $5,000 to $10,000 of starting capital. Eleven of those businesses were miserable failures, but eleven have became wildly successful multi-million dollar businesses. Rich has identified The Zig Zag Principle as his secret formula for optimizing success while minimizing failure. It is also his methodology for setting goals and living a happy, healthy life. To read Rich Christiansen’s full biography, click here.

Corporate Cultures – Individual Initiated, Rules and Standards Controlled Environment

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The Individual Initiated, Knowledge and Skills Controlled Environment represents a culture that is moving toward greater consistency in action if not action initiation. These organizations are still largely guided by local controls and individual contributors and lack the more rigorous oversight and activity reinforcement realized in supervisory and leader led companies. Thus, these organizations gain a limited amount of increased consistency while still maintaining a high level of innovation and flexibility.

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Buy-In – The Imperative Strategy

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In providing research and developing training programs for various large corporations about managing change, we find that the biggest stumbling block for employees from top-down is lack of buy-in. Top executives have the vision, but often fail to get buy-in from managers who have to carry out the change initiative. This lack of buy-in trickles down and pretty soon everyone is at odds with the change because not having been in the initial ideation sessions, they don’t see any value. Great change initiatives have died on the vine because ‘THEY are just giving us more needless things to do.’

This idea is supported by Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter, authority on leadership and change, who finds that in order to succeed, 75% of the company’s management, needs to ‘buy into’ the change.

Busy managers, who are already overwhelmed with previous change initiatives, tend to panic and jump in too fast with new systems; they act without proper preparation and neglect to get input from their team which leads to a very bumpy ride. Systems fail to reach their full potential and people become frustrated, which results in pushback, absenteeism, and low productivity. In his book entitled Influence by Robert Cialdini he explains that one of the most influential words in the English language is ‘because’. Studies have proven that no word has more power to motivate people to take action than ‘because’. Simply adding this word to a request, to a statement, to a call to action, the numbers of people who respond go up exponentially. In other words, people need a reason to give their buy-in otherwise they won’t do it, drag their heels or do it very badly.

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About the Authors

Sarah Gee is co-author of Business Improv, and as senior faculty member for The Second City Business Communications has informed, challenged, inspired and entertained audiences for Fortune 1000 companies across the globe. As facilitator, consultant, and coach she shapes and builds corporate competencies for major corporations such as General Motors, MB Financial, and United Airlines. Sarah also helps develop future leaders with Business Management training programs for executive MBA students at the University of California, Anderson School of Management, Duke University Fuqua School of Business and Columbia College. Contact Sarah: [email protected].

Val Gee is author of several books published by McGraw-Hill including: Business Improv, The Winner’s Attitude and Super Service. Since arriving in America from England in 1983, Val has designed, developed and delivered training solutions for business professionals worldwide including: Motorola, Hyatt Hotels, Siemens, DeVry University, GE Healthcare and HSBC. Bringing the power of her capability to focus on thought leadership, change management, and generating creativity, Val is currently facilitating several workshops around the U.S., for employees of a large government agency. Contact Val: [email protected], www.mjlearning.com.