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Innovation Leaders Practice Humility

Since ancient times, the merits of humility in a leader have been extolled by people who know a thing or two about leadership. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote 1,500 years ago, “I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness;...

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4 Bold Innovations in Marketing

In the past twenty years the process of reaching your customers and interacting with them has undergone a massive change, and it’s still changing. Before the digital revolution, connecting with potential customers was a hit-or-miss proposition. By sending advertising...

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How Not to Manage Innovation: The Osborne Effect

What’s the “Osborne Effect?” It’s a particularly tragic story of a self-imposed disaster that could have been avoided by the innovator getting out of the echo chamber and basing business decisions on reality, not over-exuberant fantasy. It demonstrates that innovation...

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Self-Assessment Tests for Innovation Leaders

These days, there’s an online test for nearly every facet of human behavior, and your skill as an inovation leader is no exception. These tests all have a similar structure. First, they ask you a series of multiple-choice questions designed to reveal various facets of...

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360 Reviews Need to Be Put into Context

When managers or innovation leaders need to receive a 360 review, the organization may hire external consultants to administer the surveys. The consultants then analyze and share the data with the leader, and in some cases with the managers and staff. Ideally, the...

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Innovation Leadership Assessment: The 360 Review

The question every innovation leader should grapple with is, “How am I doing?” Sure, you’ve got key performance metrics like revenues and market share that you can use and are also used by analysts and investors to judge your performance. And of course the one metric...

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Insight: How to See Yourself as Others Do

Imagine, if you will, that you’re getting ready for a significant social or business event to be held in the evening. Perhaps it’s an award program or the capstone event at a conference. You’re the guest of honor, and all eyes will be upon you. You need to be...

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Innovation Killer #10: Preening

The preening boss loves the trappings of power and prestige. He or she wants the biggest office, the most luxurious limousine, the newest private jet, the most expensive paintings on the wall. Such bosses justify their behavior by asserting that their display is...

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Innovation Killer #9: Making Impossible Demands

This blog post is about earning the respect of your colleagues and subordinates. The clueless leader may assume that the best way to get his people to respect him is to be “tough” and “push them hard.” He thinks bosses who are “soft” are not respected. It reality,...

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Innovation Killer #8: Hanky-Panky

There is an old adage that says, “You should never get your honey where you get your money.” Your work is not Match.com. Keep your love life outside the building. This is especially true if the person you’re interested in is your subordinate. To this I say one thing:...

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Innovation Killer #7: Laziness

Instead of pitching in themselves, lazy leaders dump the responsibility for innovation onto their subordinates. This can lead to low morale from overworked and under-appreciated employees. Before long, the entire organization’s productivity plummets, innovation dries...

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Innovation Killer #6: Dishonesty

This sounds obvious, but honesty requires all of the components of integrity. If honesty isn’t part of your individual DNA, you will fail. There are many ways a leader can be dishonest. Some are small and some are big, but all are bad. A few could land you in prison....

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Innovation Killer #5: Inconsistency

In their pursuit of innovation, your employees and stakeholders want clarity and consistency of values, procedures, and evaluations. They trust you to set the course and stick to it. Being flexible does not mean you change direction like a leaf in the wind. If you’re...

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Innovation Killer #3: Big Hat, No Cattle

While innovation is an activity where success is never guaranteed, saying you’re going to do something or achieve something and then failing to take action and deliver results will kill your reputation. When you promise something that you don’t deliver, your...

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Innovation Killer #2: Duplicity

Saying one thing to one person and something else to another in order to gain favor or advantage will kill your reputation and stifle innovation. Eric Schiffer, chairman of Reputation Management Consultants.com, said that such double-talk chips away at how others...

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Innovation Killer #1: Gossip

I’ve seen gossip kill the reputation of so many leaders, yet it’s incredibly predominant. This is the ironclad rule of gossip: If you tell Jones what stupid thing Smith did, then Jones will conclude that you’ll turn around and tell Smith something terrible about...

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4 Key Personal Attributes for Innovation Leaders

To become and remain an innovation leader, be sure to focus on these four key personal attributes. When you have them, you’ll be much more likely to stay ahead of the innovation curve—and your organization will be all the more profitable. 1. Develop a Keen Inward...

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Know the Innovator Personas in Your Company

We recommend our clients go through the process of ideation to identify the various personas of the key innovators working within their organization. This is a custom process. It’s not one-size-fits-all. In all their myriad behaviors, dreams, and expectations, humans...

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The Key to Innovation Leadership Is Respect

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, many investors wondered how the company could continue without his singular presence. But others knew better. As Eric Jackson wrote in The Street in 2012, shortly after the death of Jobs, “Apple could have the most amazing management team...

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Innovation Leaders Embrace Feedback

If human employees were robots who instantly followed commands from the singular controlling entity, then the top-down model would be the most agile; and if the all-powerful leader were endowed with perfect abilities and flawless judgment, the organization would stay...

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Insight: The Innovation of Servant Leadership

Innovations aren’t always amazing inventions or new products. In many cases, the most powerful innovations are internal, and which affect or transform the way an organization operates. This includes the delicate relationship between a leader and his or her employees....

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The US Army: A Surprising Center of Innovation

It’s easy to think of innovation as happening only in a trendy Silicon Valley or Brooklyn startup, where kids ride bicycles to work and appear to be thinking about stuff that may become real ten years from now. In fact, meaningful innovation can happen in every type...

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Be the Innovation Disruptor

Disruption is commonly defined as a “disturbance or problems that interrupt an event, activity, or process.” Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, wrote that successful, outstanding “incumbent” companies can do everything right and yet still lose...

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How Discomfort Spurs Innovation

Adaptation is usually triggered by some irritant or threat. Discomfort, disruption, and destruction are what drive an organization to adapt. If these forces did not exist, then nothing would change, year after year. But that’s not the way the world works—especially...

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Insight: The Increase in Clock Speed of Innovation

In the dictionary, to adapt means to adjust to changing requirements or conditions, whether internal or external. In business, it means to not merely adjust to but to embrace changing conditions. To leverage change to your advantage. To bake it into your organization...

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Get New Insights by Asking for Criticism

It’s one thing to make a state visit to your front-line employees, like the Queen of England inspecting her household staff before a big party. It’s quite another thing to actually get down into the trenches or, if that’s not possible, get unfiltered feedback and...

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Innovation Insight: Lessons from the GM Meltdown

It may have been true that even a decade ago, a successful leader could have been a technocrat, well versed in one facet of the business, who could depend on external reports and data inputs to fill in the gaps and make up for the fact that he or she was functionally...

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How to Ensure Your Innovation Message Hits Home

Our family pet is a French bulldog. His name is Lucky. In their behavior, dogs of this breed are somewhat like houseplants: They don’t like to be too hot, too cold, or really too anything. They are known for range of common ailments, and as a result we spend an...

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How to Talk About Innovation

Words are things – Maya Angelou   There is perhaps nothing I find more surprising than the fact that many leaders are incredibly careless about the way in which they use language, particularly when it comes to innovation and new ideas. In its most simple terms,...

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Bob Ross: Insights from the Unlikely Innovator

We don’t make mistakes. We just have happy accidents - Bob Ross Not everyone who innovates—and makes a difference to peoples’ lives—is an entrepreneur or chief innovation officer of a high-tech company. Here’s a true story that showed me just one of the many aspects...

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Innovation Leaders: Where Do You Fit In?

Here are a few examples of innovation leaders who consistently have stayed, or did stay, one step ahead of their competitors by inspiring those around them. They’re all very different people! Some are “high profile,” while others are low key. With LeaderLogic, there’s...

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To Innovate Is to Adapt

H.G. Wells once wrote: “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” The renowned science fiction author may have been talking about the future of humanity, but winning leaders understand exactly what he was saying. In business, change is the...

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