Author Archives: Chris Hitch

How Top Innovators Keep Winning

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Nearly all innovative companies pursue one or more of these main innovative strategies:

  • Need Seekers actively and directly engage current and potential customers to shape new products and services based on superior end-user understanding, and strive to be the first to market with those new offerings.
  • Market Readers watch their customers and competitors carefully, focusing largely on creating value through incremental change and by capitalizing on proven market trends.
  • Technology Drivers follow the direction suggested by their technological capabilities, leveraging their investment in research and development to drive both breakthrough innovation and incremental change, often seeking to solve the unarticulated needs of their customers via new technology.

The success of each of the strategies depends on how closely companies, in pursuing innovation, align their innovation strategy with their business strategy and how much effort they devote to directly understanding the needs of end-users.  The capabilities required to pursue each strategy form a systematic set of skills, processes, and tools that companies must focus on to succeed at each stage of the innovation process.

Focusing on a systematic set of capabilities means that companies must first choose the capabilities that matter most to their particular innovation strategy, and then execute them well.  Their innovation efforts must be in sync with their overall corporate strategy: They must integrate the right innovation capabilities with the right set of firm-wide capabilities, as determined by their overall strategy.

Source: Strategy + Business, Winter 2010

Secrets of Success: Ed Gore

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This is a short snippet (P. 51) of a reflection by Dr. Ed Gore, one of the Shelton Leadership Center  Board of Advisors.  You can find more reflections in the book, Secrets of Success.

“My father had so many of the skills that make an excellent leader.  He was congenial, liked by people, but what I saw and carried over into my career was his work ethic and the willingness to seize the moment.  As a father and partner, he talked to me about sad family legacies and how there were so many of these wealthy upper-class people who had opportunities but never built on their parents’ and grandparents’ dreams.  But he’d look at it all in the light of the values-based leadership rules that he lived by and that Ive tried to live by, which is exemplified by the Four-Way Test of the Rotary:

  1. Is it the truth?
  2. Is it fair to all concerned?
  3. Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
  4. Will it be beneficial to all concerned?”

 

 

The Great Repeatable Business Model

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As budgets contract while missions expand, one way to accomplish the mission might be to look at how businesses innovate their expertise to grow and become more successful.  Zook and Allen offer some insights below:

  1. Most very successful organizations do not reinvent themselves through periodic “binges and purges”.  Instead, they focus relentlessly on their fundamental strengths, and moving from strength to strength.
  2. Successful organizations learn to deliver their differentiation to the front line, creating an organization that lives and breathes its strategic advantages day in and day out, and sustaining it through constant adaptation from the market.

Four actions you can employ to sustain your competitive advantage:

  1. Ensure  you and your management team agree on differentiation NOW and in the future-ask your top team: what do our end users see as our advantages over others? How do we know?
  2. Ask the same question to those who are on the front lines interacting with end users, customers, and partners. Are the advantages similar?
  3. Write your strategy on an index card-does it include and center on key sources of differentiation?
  4. Translate strategy into a few non-negotiables. Can you describe the simple principles that drive key behaviors, beliefs, values?  Are they adhered to on a daily basis?

The article also has some key categories you can use with your team to describe and distill areas of strategic advantage and innovation.

 (Source: 2011, Zook and Allen, Harvard Business Review)

Avoiding the “One More Time” Syndrome

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“The Army doesn’t give medals for missing your kid’s first step, or Little League games.” GEN Shelton relates this nugget that he heard as a young officer from one of his commanding officers, Lieutenant Colonel Old.  As GEN Shelton relates, LT COL Old helped him remember that one of the most critical decisions you make is one as part of a family and as a parent and spouse.  LT COL Old continued, “But the thing  you have to watch out for is the one more time syndrome.  I know you love those kids. But the night the CG (Commanding General) is due to drop by and you tell yourself, ‘Just this one time I’ve got to stay late because it’s so important’- or when you’re about to walk out that door and you get word the Coast Guard got deployed and you’ve got no boats for the next morning’s exercise-those are the ones that’ll sneak up on you.” (page 117 of Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior)

As I think about GEN Shelton’s illustration,  I think that integrity in decision making is made up of the hundreds of different decisions, large and small that occur in our daily lives.  It’s not just the big decisions that demand integrity and alignment with our priorities, it’s the multiple small decisions, like bringing work home late or missing family events that can degrade integrity in one’s personal life.

Why Leaders Don’t Learn from Success

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You remember the cliche, success breeds success? Some recent research on decision making suggests that success can, in fact, breed failure by hindering learning at the individual and organizational level. Learning from success can present major challenges.  Gino and Pisano (April 2011) outline 3 interrelated traps: 

1) Fundamental attribution error: When we succeed, we think it was because of us. When we fail, we think random or external events conspired to derail us.

2) Overconfidence bias: Success breeds self-assurance and reinforces that we are on the right track. This overconfidence bias can lead to institutional arrogance and a “Not Invented Here” mentality.

3) Failure to ask why: This challenge involves the tendency to fail to systematically investigate causes of good performance: Leaders don’t ask the tough questions that can help them learn.

It’s always good when you read an article where there is a problem and a path forward toward a solution.  In this case, Gino and Pisano suggest five tactics  leaders can use to avoid these traps:

1) Celebrate but analyze your success: When a project is successful, leaders should lead investigation on reasons behind the success with the same rigor and scrutiny applied to failures.

2) Institute systematic reviews (After Action Reviews): Reviews should ask these questions: What did we set out to do? What actually happened? Why did it happen? What are we going to do next time? What are the top 5 things we would do again and the top 5 things we would not do again. The key is to ensure the same rigor for both failed and successful projects.

3) Use the right time horizons to gauge success or failure: By understanding the correct time horizons, you can prevent yourself from being fooled by randomness.

4) Replication is not learning: Six Sigma and TQM are great for determining root causes. Add to that by reviewing factors that are under your control as well as those that are affected by external events.

5) Experiment: Experimentation is a way to test assumptions and theories on what is needed to achieve high levels of performance. The right question for leaders is not “What is going well?” but “What experiments are we running?”