Leading Innovation - Changing Corporate Culture

Set a compelling vision that paints an appealing, believable, and challenging future to guide innovation, unite the team with a shared purpose, and enable delegation to achieve value for customers.

Develop long-term visions by writing department and organization statements that span six months, twelve months, and two years, guiding innovation and clarifying priorities.

Craft a declaration of innovation that explains why change matters and outlines key areas, inviting every employee to contribute ideas with allocated resources and a risk-friendly, listening culture.

Assess your strengths and weaknesses as innovative leader by scoring yourself 1 to 10 on characteristics, then identify areas such as trust, communication, and listening and create an action plan.

Give everyone two jobs: perform your current role with excellence and seek a better way to deliver value for internal or external customers, showing leadership potential.

Set personal and department innovation goals by writing targets, ideas, budgets, and success metrics, then finalize a sheet with those goals for personal and departmental improvement.

Trust and empower your people to try new approaches, tolerate failure, and avoid micromanagement, as shown by Ted Hoff’s microprocessor breakthrough at Intel and Virgin Brides under Ailsa Petchey.

Lead innovation by confronting the fear of change, engaging dialogue about risks and benefits, and communicating a clear vision to overcome complacency and inspire positive transformation.

Lead innovation by breaking down silos through shared objectives, cross-functional teams, and deliberate mixing of people and spaces. Encourage collaboration, celebrate cross-department ideas, and disrupt routine to unlock fresh solutions.

Leaders of risk-averse organizations foster an innovation culture by embracing failure as a learning opportunity, praising attempts, sharing personal failures, and distinguishing honorable from incompetent failures.

Understand how leading firms fail despite doing the right things, as disruptive technologies overtake sustaining ones, and learn how new entrants win in emerging markets through the innovator's dilemma graph.