Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog

I am a big believer of open work space particular in our business (see photos above of our typical work sessions). It reflects who you are and also shows your collective identity. If done right, it creates a possible energy sphere that will help organizations overcome many necessary hurdles that one may encounter during growth. I am seeing the return to the power of creativity and innovation in the next 10 years as organization ran of ideas for growth. The kind of thinking - the emphasis om innovation and invention in all its forms - has always been revered by entrepreneurs. Steve Jobs credited Land's inspiration for the culture of Apple. (Edwin Lands is the founder of Polaroid who owns more than 500 patents). Not every company has a Steve Job or Edwin Land, and what do you do when you don't have one?

What is a high performance culture? What is a creative culture? Will performance means sacrificing creativity? Are your people motivated to act like the defender of the company's culture? Do they know how to innovate and are they encouraged to bring those ideas to the company? Will they be thinking about how to advance the business without being explicitly asked what to do? Will they spend their own time dreaming up new ways to delight customers? Every leader wishes that they have a culture for all threats to happen. Having the best of both worlds - performance and creativity. Many are pushing too hard on the performance front and as a result creativity and innovation suffers, and so their performances.

For a handful of top performers, however, the picture looks different. These companies inspire loyalty from customers and employees, who want to stay and be part of something special. They generate commitment to go the extra mile, to do the right thing rather than just the easy thing. At these companies, people not only know what they should do, they know how to do it and also deeply believe in why they do it. That's the power of a high performance culture. Founder and chairman of Southwest Airlines, puts it this way:"Everything [in our strategy] our competitors could copy tomorrow.
But they can't copy the culture--and they know it. It is the ultimate sustainable competitive advantage.

Companies are increasing global, distributed and extended, so culture provides the glue that creates
trust and a sense of shared purpose. It is easy to wish that there's a magic formula and thinking that all high-performance cultures look alike. They don't, and that is part of their power. Almost all of them are unique and often influenced by the personalities of their leaderships. To be effective, a high-performance culture must be customized - called it "culture couture".

Making it real requires a is a mixture of common values, beliefs, and their manifestation in everyday behavior (including the leadership). Sometimes it becomes a visible artifacts, such as a mission statement or companies news letter. This is becoming less effective these days. What good is a piece of writing that so company is acting in it. Clues  exist in the ways people act every day on the job, in the language, in the conversations. How much time does the CEO spend with the staff and customers? Does he/she spend time on the field listening to customer problems? How many bottom-up ideas get implemented and celebrated? Will the CEO personally encourage new ideas and make sure they receive the right attention?  This is not about talking innovation, it is about showing that innovation is part of the authentic core--the unique soul and personality that define a company's character. Here are some ideas that CEOs can do:

Create "buffer zones" for the most innovative people: Creating "buffer zones" means building a kind of  cocoon around the innovative teams. That means eliminating the ways that policies or other work pressures get in the way or discourage the experimentation in the early stage.

Use outsiders as "innovation catalysts:" This can make a difference as they not only bringing fresh thinking but also tools and cross-industry experiences. Try to encourage the use of "design thinking" to conceptualize new ideas and explore all possibilities.

Give them room to "play:" For innovators, anything they can do to mess around with the kinds of data or projects that they see as helpful - will be helpful. But during the incubation stage, activities that may look like useless diversions - that may not even look like work - are all necessary to allow the deeper parts of the brain to solve a problem and make new connections. 

Don't look for quick results: Any team can develop innovative solutions, there is no business or customer interfaces that can not be improved through play and modification. But to build a culture that truly encourages innovation, the pressure to get immediate results will yield only incremental improvements, and the need to meet deadlines can sometimes kill the creative process while they are still fragile.

Commit to driving the best ideas through to implementation: Innovators are seldom the best salespeople for their ideas although there are a few exceptions. CEOs who want to encourage innovation must act as the first-line filter to test the best ideas and solutions, choosing which ones are the right ones to see through to fruition. Then the they must appoint advocate commit to the internal sales and marketing project to build coalitions. This takes courage and persistence, and an ability to work the political and social process involved in getting others to adapt to innovation. 

Original Post: http://mootee.typepad.com/innovation_playground/2008/02/building-an-inn.html