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Entrepreneurial Creativity
A
noble purpose inspires sacrifice,
stimulates innovation and encourages
perseverance.
Great
accomplishments start with great
aspirations.
To
discover the future it is not
necessary to be a seer, but it is
absolutely vital to be
unorthodox.
From
Gandhi to
Mandela, from the American
patriot to the Polish shipbuilders,
the makers of revolutions have not
come from the top.
As
human beings, we are the only
organisms that
create for the sheer stupid
pleasure of doing so. Whether it's
laying out a garden, composing a new
tune on the piano, writing a bit of
poetry, manipulating a digital
photo, redecorating a room, or
inventing a new chili recipe ‒ we
are
happiest when we are
creating.
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Remarkable contributions are
typically spawned by a
passionate
commitment to transcendent
values such as
beauty, truth,
wisdom, justice, charity,
fidelity,
joy,
courage and honor.
The
goal is not to speculate on what
might happen, but to
imagine what you can make
happen.
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Value
Innovation
At the
pinnacle of great
design are
products so gorgeous and
lust-worthy that you want to lick
them.
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Executives often wrongly equate
“good value” with “low price.”
Instead, “good value” should mean
outstanding value for the
price.
In a
world of commoditized knowledge, the
returns go to the companies who can
produce non-standard knowledge.
Online
hierarchies are inherently dynamic.
The moment someone stops adding
value to the community, his
influence starts to wane.
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Leading
Innovation
Out
there in some garage is an
entrepreneur who's forging a
bullet with your company's name on
it. You've got one option now – to
shoot first. You've got to
out-innovate the
→
innovators.
Today, no
leader can afford to be
indifferent to the challenge of
engaging employees in the work of
creating the future. Engagement may
have been optional in the past, but
it's pretty much the whole game
today.
Put
simply, hyper-rational executives
produce hyper-boring products.
Most of us understand that
innovation is enormously
important. It's the only insurance
against irrelevance. It's the only
guarantee of long-term
customer loyalty. It's the only
strategy for out-performing a
dismal economy.
Win
small, win early, win often.
There’s no such thing as
“sustaining” leadership; it must be
reinvented again and again.
Discovering,
Inventing
All of us are prisoners, to one
degree or another, of our
experience.
You can't use an old map to see a
new land.
Fact
is,
inventing an
innovative
business model is often mostly a
matter of
serendipity.
The essential insight doesn't come
out of any dirigiste planning
process; it comes form some cocktail
of happenstance,
desire, curiosity, ambition and
need. But at the end of the day,
there has to be a degree of
foresight ‒ a sense of where new
riches lie. So
radical innovation is always one
part fortuity and one part
clearheaded
vision.
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Innovative
Company
We've reached the end of
incrementalism. Only those
companies that are capable of
creating
industry revolutions will
prosper in the
new economy.
To escape the curse of
commoditization, a company has to be
a
game-changer, and that requires
employees who are
proactive,
inventive and
zealous.
An enterprise that is constantly
exploring new horizons is likely to
have a
competitive advantage in
attracting and retaining talent.
You have to train people how to be
business innovators. If you
don't train them, the quality of the
ideas that you get in an innovation
marketplace is not likely to be
high.
To create an organization that's
adaptable and
innovative, people need the
freedom to challenge precedent, to
'waste' time, to go outside of
channels, to
experiment, to
take risks and to follow their
passions.
An
adaptable company is one that
captures more than its fair share of
new opportunities. It's always
redefining its 'core business' in
ways that open up new avenues for
growth.
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Management innovation is going
to be the most enduring
source of competitive advantage.
There will be lots of rewards for
firms in the vanguard.
Perseverance may be just as
important as speed in the battle for
the future.
Strategy
Innovation
Businesses fail when they
over-invest in what is at the
expense of what could be.
There's a simple, but oft-neglected
lesson here: to sustain success, you
have to be willing to abandon things
that are no longer successful.
The biggest barriers to strategic
renewal are almost always top
management's unexamined beliefs.
Dakota tribal wisdom says that when
you're on a dead horse, the best
strategy is to dismount. Of course,
there are other strategies. You can
change riders. You can get a
committee to study the dead horse.
You can benchmark how other
companies ride dead horses. You can
declare that it's cheaper to feed a
dead horse. You can harness several
dead horses together. But after
you've tried all these things,
you're still going to have to
dismount.
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