Leadership’s innovation role

In a very old Bill Cosby routine….God asks Noah to build him an ark. Noah says “right, what’s an ark?” God also tells Noah how big by telling him how many cubits tall, long, and wide. Noah says “right, what’s a cubit”?

It’s the same way with innovation. Leadership can say “we need to be more innovative” and maybe provide a few measures to track progress. As with any important initiative, leadership has to get close to the action and remain close. That’s easy for many leaders, after all how many times have we gone through this change management stuff?

What’s really difficult with innovation is that for many that have ascended to a key leadership role; they did so by limiting risk, carefully improving productivity, continuous improvement, being the operations person, etc. Innovating or creating new businesses requires discontinuity, a level of destruction and disruption. What got you there will not keep you there without making a few very personal changes.

Innovation begins with the leader believing, really believing, that it’s critical to long term success and relevance in the market place. You must believe that innovation is the strongest strategy for building wealth in today’s economy. We all talk about how much everything is changing every day. None of us are exempt from a dramatic shift in technology, environment, regulations, customer interest etc. Foster and Kaplan (McKinsey) in the late 80s examined more than 1,000 companies in 15 industries and discovered that even the best-run and most widely admired companies are unable to sustain market-beating levels of performance for more than 10 to 15 years. This was in the 80s’, with today’s technological progress, we are talking about 5-8 years!

Don’t even begin if you are consumed with day to day operations and waiting for the right time to innovate. But, if you want to leave a legacy or just make sure the business is viable and growing for the next 5- 10 years, there is no time like the present to begin implementing an innovation strategy. It begins with leadership.