From The Circle of Innovation – You Can’t Shrink Your Way to Greatness By Tom Peters, 544 pages
In today's fast-moving and evolving markets, the organizations that fail to respond to challenges in a timely and smart manner too often are tomorrow's casualties. Recognizing the need to change is only the first part. Successful adoption and implementation of effective change is the challenge next-generation business leaders face on a continuous basis. Having proven techniques to draw from is one advantage that forward-looking responsible business leaders will leverage as a matter of course. Co-author of In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters book The Circle of Innovation provides a few to keep handy when the winds of change are blowing at your door.
In today's fast-moving and evolving markets, the organizations that fail to respond to challenges in a timely and smart manner too often are tomorrow's casualties. Recognizing the need to change is only the first part. Successful adoption and implementation of effective change is the challenge next-generation business leaders face on a continuous basis. Having proven techniques to draw from is one advantage that forward-looking responsible business leaders will leverage as a matter of course. Co-author of In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters book The Circle of Innovation provides a few to keep handy when the winds of change are blowing at your door.
- Embrace seismic change. Recognize your market is very likely the world, even with local business, and the world is competing against you. As a result, adopting a strategy of small incremental changes to address this challenge will likely result in too little and ultimately too late. Consider the prospect of completely tearing down your business model (“Destruction is cool”) and rebuilding it on new assumptions and understandings. Target the old, dysfunctional and irrelevant and rub it out (“You can’t live without an eraser”) then replace with elements designed to address the challenges.
- Empower productive autonomy and responsibility in groups and individuals. Recognize that each member of your organization has a stake in the success of the business. (“Loosen the reins in the organization.”) Encourage professional development of each individual’s skills and capabilities and facilitate each department within the business to approach their mandate from the perspective of a professional services-style mission, to excel and innovate continuously to achieve that success (“All value comes from professional services”). Facilitate entrepreneurial initiatives at all levels.
- Engage processes, goals and objectives directly. Over years – and with the adoption and acceptance of traditional thinking – the mindset of compartmentalized thinking, along with the assumption of intermediaries and brittle business processes, has left individuals and organizations too often hobbled in their thinking and approach to success. A streamlining of processes and procedures and reenvisioning of hierarchies must be challenged and welcomed. (“Abandon incrementalism.”) Recognizing the requirement of accepting responsibility to do it yourself, and retiring the idea of the middleman is a new normal (“The intermediary is doomed”).
- Elevate and optimize the organization’s talent profile. Recruit your people broadly and with imagination. Abandon the traditional hierarchical, gender and cultural attitudes, and bring the most dynamic and passionate individuals into your organization. Enable leaders with accomplished achievement in information and knowledge work. (“The nerds have won.”) Your people are your agents of dynamic innovation and successful change. Facilitate and nurture their entrepreneurial initiatives.
- Exaggerate commitment and invention. Innovation must become a top-line and bottom-line obsession. (“Think revolution.”) Today’s business demands zealots with vision. Design your products and services customers that hunger to have, and always enforce the constant strengthening of your brand. (“Innovate or die!”) Brand strengthening is a constant commitment on all levels by all members of the organization. Foster the “WOW!” brand.
“Forgetting – not
learning – is the
highest art.”