Powerful Solving in the Foundation of Innovation - Matthew Battle

Why innovate? “No matter what anybody else tells you: corporations achieve competitive advantage through acts of innovation.” Peter Drucker According to the Boston Consulting Group 2006 survey Result, 72% of the executives rank innovation as a top-three strategic priority, up from 66% in 2005. 72% of respondents said their companies would increase spending on innovation in 2006. At the same time, many executives—nearly half of those surveyed—remain unsatisfied with the financial returns on their companies’ investments in innovation. Does that sound familiar to you? Why is innovation so important to CEO s? In the past, there has been a major trend among companies to reduce cost. 6-Sigma tools were so efficient for cost-cutting in transactional areas, as well as in technical areas, that their reputation has reached every big company. What they want: To gain money! This rigorous approach allows you to increase your margin by the given formula: Profits = Revenues – Costs Big profits can for sure come from decreasing your costs. But, in the end, even if a company has become the most efficient one on earth, it doesn’t mean it will be the most profitable. Why? Because the revenues will stay fixed, and more, will decrease year after year as the customer gets used to the product, and because competitors will launch some new, audacious products to compete with it!

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Learning to View Your Customers as a Powerful Tribe - Ed Welch

A CEO using Twitter to connect with customers? Why? Tony Hsieh (pronounced “Shay”), CEO of Zappos.com, uses Twitter to connect with customers. Why would a busy, important, successful CEO want to connect with customers? Make no mistake; Hsieh isn’t using Twitter for a marketing gimmick, but to make meaningful connections. The Dallas Mavericks went from being one of the worst basketball franchises in the National Basketball Association (NBA), to being one of the best and most valuable. The reason is usually sitting somewhere in the crowds at Maverick games. His name is Mark Cuban. Mark is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. His leadership lifted them to heights never before thought possible. How? Mark knows how to connect. Guess where he sits during games? With the fans. Guess who reads all the emails sent to the Dallas Mavericks? Mark does. He usually wears a jersey, not a suit and tie. He dresses like a fan and acts like a fan. Mark understands that connecting with fans is the key to the success of the Mavericks. Herb Kelleher, a legend of Southwest Airlines. Herb Kelleher was frequently spotted on Southwest flights, chatting with ordinary passengers. Why? Surely he had more important things to do? Kelleher was connecting with his customers.

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A World Without Surprise

The ChangeThis instructions read: “If you have a book...please use it only as a jumping-off point from which to isolate a particularly intriguing idea.” Well, I have a book. It’s called Pow! Right Between The Eyes! And its particularly intriguing idea opens mouths, pops eyes and, may I say, whups ass. While potent and influential, it is also the most bullying of ideas; taunting me, challenging me, expecting me, every time, to do something different. For the idea is Surprise, more specifically, “the power of it.” Even more specifically, “the unsung and underutilized power of it in modern-day business.” To write a manifesto about this power, filling pages of prose with pertinent examples, theories and tactics, would’ve been easy. Perhaps I can even be as immodest to say it would’ve been enlightening. But it wouldn’t have been Surprising.

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Built-to-Last is Built on “Create and Serve”

Good stories fascinate us all. They always have. They always will. At this moment in our nation’s history, we are seeing two epic stories evolving—in terms of our new President, and in the state of our economy. The story of Obama many believe is epic, and certainly the story of our nation’s recession and economic downfall is also a burgeoning epic tale. Stories move societies forward. They inspire, engage and initiate change through their telling and re-telling. Basically, there are two types of stories: Truth Stories and True Stories. Stories, Storytelling, Story-Selling in Business

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Live the Juggle Life

Work We are all obsessed by it. That 4-letter word. We spend our lives doing it, thinking about it, talking about it. So, if you’re not doing it right or you don’t like it, then you have a problem. Too many people get stuck in a rut in their careers and work lives. They get embedded in a “this is how things should be done” culture, where they are slaves to the corporation, where they leave scrambled up world of work, everything’s changing in ways we could never have anticipated. Wall BlackBerries; we want to be in control of our destiny. Street banks crash overnight, airlines go out of business in a flash, and long established institutions suddenly fade from the business landscape. Technology revolutionizes how we do business, and trading barriers have crumbled as we face competition not just from the next zip code, but from the other side of the planet. Long established global corporations face threats from young start-ups. The only certainty (of course) is that everything’s changing. Increasingly, we are ideas-rich, yet time-poor. Our lives are full of growing to-do lists, of jobs to do, ideas to develop, but not enough hours in the day. We don’t want to be slaves to our bosses or our their personality at the office door, and the Work You is a million miles away from the Real You.

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