The Power of Reflection on Innovation - Dr Ralph Kerle, the Creative Leadership Forum

In creativity, it is often not until you have completed a piece of work that the obvious intent of the work appears to you.

This is particularly relevant in the case of innovation. Personal creativity, the input that produces organizational innovation, never follows a direct path and this has important strategic implications for organizations pursuing systemic innovation as a prime business objective.

Our challenge in developing the analytic, the Management Innovation Index™ (the MIX™), was to model an organization's innovation as a whole system in order to make innovation measurable. Over 3 years, we trialled...read more....

One Giant Leap to Nowhere - Tom E Wolfe's Great Story on Poor Strategic Innovation | NYTimes.com

WELL, let’s see now ... That was a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind and a real knee in the groin for NASA. Enlarge This Image The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean — O.K. if I add “godlike”? — quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon. It was no ordinary dead-and-be-done-with-it death. It was full-blown purgatory, purgatory being the holding pen for recently deceased but still restless souls awaiting judgment by a Higher Authority. Like many another youngster at that time, or maybe retro-youngster in my case, I was fascinated by the astronauts after Apollo 11.

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What Great Companies Know About Culture - Deidre H. Campbell - Harvard Business Review

Even in this unprecedented business environment, great leaders know they should invest in their people. Those companies who are committed to a strong workplace culture tend to perform well, and now they are featured prominently in a new ranking recently released by Great Place to Work Institute. Among the top performers on the 2011 World's Best Multinational Companies list are culturally-strong technology companies such as Microsoft, NetApp, SAS, and Google. But is there a direct correlation between employee investment and the balance sheet? As Prof. James L. Heskett wrote in his latest book The Culture Cycle, effective culture can account for 20-30 percent of the differential in corporate performance when compared with "culturally unremarkable" competitors.

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Watch as a young Steve Jobs brainstorms with the NeXT team in 1985....

What is quite extraoridnary about these videos is that Jobs saw the Apple computer as a way of revolutionising higher education. The sad reflection as you will see here is that Apple the company revolutionised the computer, music and telecommunications but failed to move the most important contemporary civilising industry - education!!

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The Global Innovation 1000: Why Culture Is Key - Booz and Company Annual Study

Booz & Company’s annual study shows that spending more on R&D won’t drive results. The most crucial factors are strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation.

Download and read the whole report here.