INNOVATE ONLY REACTIVELY

The best way to do this is to use lots of metaphors and make it about 'beating' the competition. 'Charge!' 'Let's cut off their escape routes.' Whenever our company conversation starts sounding like a B-movie reel, watch out!

The problem with an exclusive fixation on such metaphors is that then everything you do 'reacts' to what they're doing, and as long as you're ahead of them, that's defined as 'success'. That can be hollow and self-defeating. It's also true, however, that in SOME environments, where there is a danger of complacency, or lack of awareness of the magnitude of challenges ahead, such metaphors can provide a powerful and necessary rallying cry. But we need to balance this.

Moreover, the best metaphor for corporate success is NOT war. The key question, as leading strategists tell us, is not how to beat our competition, but how to be DIFFERENT from them.

We have to therefore decide on OUR story, not just on how to beat theirs. We have to pick a story that MATTERS to our customers and which we are excited to fulfill. And then we have to create some basis for competitive advantage that isn't easy to copy. This could be product innovation, process innovation, service innovation, cultural innovation (how we organise and galvanise our team of talent), or some combination thereof. Our aim is to be 'first in mind' and 'first in heart' and be a valued part of our customer's lives on our own terms.

Now, let me be clear. This doesn't in any way mean you should IGNORE your competitors. Nor does it mean to be unaware of what they are doing. Moreover, if they do something, and you genuinely think it's a good idea for you and your value proposition and that you can implement it better, go for it. There are many companies who have remained market leaders by being 'okay' at innovation, but implementing and executing far better than their competitors.

What I am saying however, is that if the aim is to innovate and create new value space, then do that by 'imagining' a future you want to create, not just by playing 'defensive tackle' to the tactics and movements of your competitors. Otherwise, who we are becomes imprisoned by our competition and their moves. They, not the market or our vision, become the dominant reality. It's a sad mistake to empower them that much!

To make this happen, we need numerous things: first a larger vantage point and helicopter view of the industry and society; we need a 'deep dive' into the market and our consumers' lives; and we need innovation that is continually experimenting, learning, adventuring, from the perspective of the customers and their lives; not based on our own internal logic or the hobbyhorses du jour in corporate HQ.

DROWN PEOPLE IN DETAIL

This is a great way to demotivate people, derail potentially good initiatives and just diminish overall enthusiasm. This one is best illustrated by an example.

I was sitting in on a company presentation. This company had a project called 'Simplification'. Great idea! Only problem was that it was being presented with blood-curdling boredom, using 54 slides (I kid you not!). The perverse irony of 'project simplification' requiring 54 congested slides, seemed lost on virtually everyone. Not being hypnotized by the corporate way 'things were done', I started chuckling. A few others followed, and pretty soon the room was in titters. The person presenting seemed nonplussed and teetering on the verge of outrage.

I asked him if he saw anything strange about 54 slides for 'simplificatíon'. After a while, the light bulb went on. After the break, he came back with 32 slides! I was impressed by this fast-tracked distillation, until I realised he had actually just changed the font size!

'Leadership by Power Point' doesn't work. Leadership is a 'contact sport' and requires real interaction and energy. So many endless corporate presentations and initiatives produce an 'overload'. We need simplicity, a clear exciting, igniting story that people sit up and take notice regarding and are eager to understand and implement.

The wonderful conductor Ben Zander says he asks himself when confronted by a less than inspired orchestra, 'Who am I being that their eyes are not shining?' What a miracle of a question! We should ALL ask that! Who are we being, who are we NOT being, how are we communicating, how are we NOT communicating, that their eyes are not shining?

Forget the endless slide shows, people don't need to be drowned in detail. Like E = MC squared, we need the 'juice', the jazz, the electricity, the excitement. Then, we'll listen to details. Otherwise, we're bored before we begin. And the initiative is basically dead at birth, unless ennui and exasperation were its aims.

DON'T FOCUS

This is where we have a deluge of 'priorities', so many that we can't see or think straight. This way people are always running and nobody knows what's most important. One of the high water marks of strategy is to know what you WON'T do. When succumbing to this anti-leadership tactic, that's conspicuously absent.

What usually happens here is we produce a multi-pronged strategy, groaning under endless action plans. The danger here is the confusion between 'activity' and 'results'. People then constantly moan about having too much to do, but very little time goes into what it would be most IMPORTANT to do.

CEO icon Jack Welch's meteoric career at GE shows the alternative option. Welch started with a simple proposition, 'We're going to be 1 or 2 in every business we're in. Or else we're going to fix it, close it, or sell it and reinvest the cash in winning businesses.' Absolute focus went into that as well as into rightsizing the businesses that survived the scrutiny. At that time people called him 'Neutron Jack'. However, he was making sure the businesses were 'fit for growth', and the right people were on board.

The next focus went into empowerment and attacking bureaucracy. This was 'Work Out', which was all about taking unnecessary 'work out' of the organisation based on wide-scale input and participation across the length and breadth of the organisation. Everybody knew this was THE priority during this stage.

Key initiatives like 360 degree appraisal and coaching, moving into services, going global, Six Sigma, e-commerce, all came along. However, please note that in a 20 year career, you can count these in just over the fingers of one hand. Absolute focus and no bullshit. When long-term GEérs dragged their feet over Work-Out for example, they were unceremoniously removed. That sent an absolute signal that this wasn't the usual corporate 'song and dance'.

Welch's successor, Jeffrey Immelt seems to have two overriding areas of focus for GE, and this is the message he's delivering again and again. One, he wants to move beyond Welch's acquisition focus and return GE to its roots, of world-moving INNOVATION. All of GE's businesses are focusing in that arena. The second is expanding the services domain and becoming genuinely 'intimate' with the customer. They call this ACFC (AT the Customer, For the Customer). Here, GE people strategise alongside the customer, are based at their sites, and so envision and innovate forward with them. Again, note the clarity, specificity, and strategic focus oozing from every corporate pore.

An ex-GEér James McNerney (one of the finalists as Welch's replacement), now heads 3M. 3M has had a remarkable turnaround and growth period since McNerney arrived at the helm. The entire strategic priorities of 3M are found on 4 post-its, 2 items per post-it. Everyone can understand and imbibe these key 8 areas of focus. McNerney talks about his key strategic principle: 'boring consistency'.

I agree we need enough actions ongoing to spark positive innovative surprises. And in the business growth vernacular we talk about hitting enough 'singles and doubles' (thanks to Ram Charan for this iteration) to keep growth moving, until we alight upon the opportunity that will hit the ball firmly out of the park. But WHERE we focus these singles and doubles and these adventures is a strategic choice and requires FOCUS.

Strategy is both a directional choice and an emergent process we have to attend to, respond to, and be nimble enough to adapt to. Focus is not the choice of tactics or specific solutions (we can't know these except by getting out there and playing the game passionately and imaginatively), it is just the choice of the playground (as well as battleground) where we feel our experiences will have the greatest relevance and greatest value.

DON'T FOLLOW THROUGH

Most companies will readily confess, as will most leaders, that they start many more things than they actually finish. 'Finishing skills' are a big deficit in most organisations and most leaders.

What usually happens is, as mentioned above, all kinds of initiatives are kicked off with fanfare and corporate pom pom waving. Many of these die a quiet death, as there's no follow-up, or rather the initiative was short-hand for some type of efficiency or cost-management exercise, which then takes center-stage in its unvarnished form.

The etymological root of the word 'success' is to 'follow through'. While many talk about Welch as an 'acquisition' guy, he was fundamentally an 'execution' guy. Immelt and McNerney exemplify that too. All great leaders do. Once you have areas of focus, you then have to make them your overwhelming obsession, and ensure you and everyone else follows through in every way possible.

One CEO I know, used to ask every employee he ran into, 'What have you done recently to make a real impact on our customer understanding and innovation?' He asked this of secretaries, people in finance, everyone. When people picked him up at the airport, they got this question. When he was in an elevator, everyone tried to leap out as decorously as they could, because they knew what they'd have to answer. If there was no answer, a very SPECIFIC and actual one, they knew they'd get grilled. After a while, employees started asking, 'Uh sir, if you don't mind, what have YOU done...' This was the dialogue, passion, interaction. Performance appraisals focused on this, leadership development was perfumed with it, it was everywhere.

Another aspect of follow through is facing facts. It happens so frequently that companies literally do murder the Babylonian messenger who brings bad news. Such companies literally position people to 'tackle the truth' before it reaches their bosses. Wise leaders will ruthlessly remove such insulation and reward people instead for bringing them the 'toughest facts' and 'most challenging realities' EARLY, however WITH recommendations for a response or improvement. Hence they aren't just encouraging whiners, but people willing to proactively engage with and remake the realities they face.

Yes we need new approaches and new initiatives. But for them to have any credibility, let's pick the 3-4 that would truly deliver our key areas of focus, and then let's make them everybody's accountability and deliverable.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTIONS FLOWING FROM THE ABOVE

Decide who your company is, what's the core story? Make sure that story flows from your company's abilities and passion (as we explained in the first article), and make sure you don't define yourself purely in response to your competitors. How will you be 'dramatically different', not as per your own hype, but in the actual value experience of your customers? Also, let's make sure all our innovation isn't 'remedial', ie. fixing problems. A fair share has to be 'generative', trying to make what we already do 'well', radically BETTER.

Knowing that it's about stories and emotions, let's not drown our people in detail. Let's communicate in a way that does justice to the essence and excitement of what we're communicating. Let's make our leadership communication as imaginative and as energizing as we want our market communication to be. Let's make sure we're galvanized ourselves before trying to galvanize others.

Let's ensure everyone knows the 4-8 key areas of 'winning success' that we believe will catapult our organisation and its value proposition forward. Then we can challenge leaders at all levels to collaborate and synergize to make that happen. Let's leave no doubt, and let's deal fairly but forcefully with snipers and stragglers. Let's also make heroes and positive case studies about those who ARE living and delivering on the priorities and values identified.

Finally, having focused, let's follow through, let's finish, let's milk things for what they're worth. Let's honor facts and face them, whether brutal or thrilling. But let's ensure we create the type of staying power, measurements, visibility, affirmation, mutual communication, learning that allows us to share in each other's progress, and even each other's mistakes for cumulative learning.

In a few weeks, we'll deliver the final four of our favourite leadership perversities. In the meantime, may you have a productive and powerful experience demoting the above four lunacies into relics of the past rather than the present barnacles that hold back your own leadersip success.

Happy engagement!

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