The Many Faces of Innovation

In my recent post Charting a Course for Corporate Success, I outlined three, broad categories of innovation:

• Disruptive, Breakthrough Innovations.
• Sustaining, High-Value Change.
• Everyday Creativity and Emergent Innovation.

When it comes to leading businesses, it is important that we don’t just come up with new things; we need to innovate in ways that create value for our customers. As research by Robert Wolcott and Mohanbir Sawhney demonstrates, there are many different ways that business can innovate to achieve this outcome. They came up with twelve dimensions of innovation that we can consider:

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The Value of Business Focus

The essential, underlying aspect of your company’s strategy is its distinctive competence and the perceived value of this competence by your customers. You need to articulate your purpose, and this requires a strong focus.

A great example of exquisite focus is found in the book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. While I personally lack experience in manufacturing, I can certainly appreciate the example of Crown Cork & Seal and its brilliant strategy crafted by John F. Connelly in the 1960s.

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Charting a Course for Corporate Success

At a time when corporate survival rates are declining, what do companies – and leaders in particular – need to do to chart a course when maps aren’t readily available? You can’t “cut your way to glory” – at some point businesses need to innovate and grow. But how do you evaluate what the right direction is for your company? Where should you focus?

This is a difficult challenge, and unfortunately, there isn’t a step-by-step cookbook available to solve this problem. I’ve culled together advice from several sources to aid in charting your own course to success. Fair warning: This isn’t a process, just a framework for thinking that provides a little orientation. I’ll admit that is a lot easier pulling this information together than applying it; the hard part is involves thinking deeply about your own situation.

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Book Review: Steve Jobs

I have to say that this book had me believing that I would dislike Steve Jobs because he came across as a spoiled (crying when he didn’t get his own way), arrogant tyrant to work for, a harsh and insensitive individual to be friends with, and a man who was distant and neglectful towards his family. However, Walter Isaacson balanced this view of Steve Jobs with a detailed treatment of the qualities that made Steve Jobs great.

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3 Sets of Agile Questions

With Scrum, there are three questions that each team member answers in the daily standup meeting:

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What am I planning to do today?
3. Do I have any impediments?

These questions target the day-to-day work, but are there questions that can and should be asked as teams conduct a sprint review or a retrospective? Yes. And the right questions are a different set of questions that should explore the value that teams provide their company and the customer.

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Overcoming Monkey Business

In the self-managed environment of Agile development, managers can come away feeling like they have a lot less to do. After all, management no longer directly assigns and monitors the work, right? A natural follow-up question might be: with autonomous teams, why do we even need managers?

Autonomy should never mean hands-off. Even autonomous teams need a helping hand every now and then. Remember the old saying reminding us that someone, “Can’t see the forest for the trees”? We all can get so involved with the details that we lose sight of the bigger picture. Managers happen to be in a great position to provide a broader perspective to teams that can contribute to more effective day-to-day decision making of the team.

I came across another piece of information to consider in Mike Rother's book, Toyota Kata. In it, Rother cited a research paper on continuous improvement at Toyota written by Professor Koichi Shimizu of Okayama University, which contrasted improvements carried out by production operators (via quality circles, suggestion systems, etc.) and improvements carried out by team leaders or supervisory staff.

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