|
Courageous leaders inspire employees, energize customers, and position their companies on the front lines of societal change. Bill George explains why there aren't more of them.
Courage is the quality that distinguishes great leaders from excellent managers. Courageous leaders take risks that go against the grain of their organizations. They make decisions with the potential for revolutionary change in their markets. Their boldness inspires their teams, energizes customers, and positions their companies as leaders in societal change.
Courageous leaders lead with principles–their True North–that guide them when pressure mounts. They don’t shirk bold actions because they fear failure. They don’t need external adulation, nor do they shrink from facing criticism. It takes bold decisions to build great global companies. If businesses are managed without courageous leadership, then R&D programs, product pipelines, investments in emerging markets, and employees’ commitment to the company’s mission all wither.
Let’s look at some recent examples of courageous leaders whose actions transformed their companies:
- Alan Mulally When Mulally arrived at Ford, he found a depleted organization losing $18 billion that year and unwilling to address its fundamental issues. To retool Ford’s entire product line and automate its factories, Mulally borrowed $23.5 billion, convincing the Ford family to pledge its stock and the famous Ford Blue Oval as collateral. His bold move paid off.
- Mary Barra, GM’s CEO since 2014, testified before a hostile Senate investigating committee about deaths from failed ignition switches on Chevrolet Camaros. Rather than make excuses, Barra took responsibility for the problems and went further to attribute them to “GM’s cultural problems.” Three years later, she is well on her way to transforming GM’s moribund, finance-driven culture into a dynamic, accountable organization focused on building quality vehicles worldwide.
- Paul Polman When Polman became Unilever’s CEO in early 2009, he immediately began transforming the company, declaring bold goals to double revenues and generate 70 percent from emerging markets. He aligned 175,000 employees around sustainability, publishing the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan with well-defined metrics the following year.
- Indra Nooyi: Named CEO of PepsiCo in 2006, Nooyi foresaw the coming shift among consumers, especially the millennial generation, to healthier foods and beverages. She immediately introduced PepsiCo’s strategy “Performance with Purpose,” that focuses on complementing the company’s core soft drink and snack business with healthy foods and beverages.
There are literally thousands of competent managers who can run organizations efficiently using pre-determined operating plans, but few with the courage to transform entire enterprises.
The courage cohort includes Delta’s Richard Anderson, Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy and Ursula Burns, Nestle’s Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Novartis’ Dan Vasella, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Merck’s Ken Frazier, and Alibaba’s Jack Ma. They join the growing list of authentic leaders that have made courageous decisions to build great global companies.
To quote poet Maya Angelou, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”
|
I firmly believe we are on the cusp of a new innovation era. When you step back and recognize all the different advancements we have been making in designing tools and frameworks, in understanding innovation, it holds promise. There are a number of intersections and driving forces that are coming together and what is emerging is this new innovation era. Now we have to weave them together. Much of what we have will still remain. We are still in need of finding innovations that provide new products, services or business models. These outcomes remain constant, it is the way we approach these that is in need of being seen as dramatically different.
Innovation is hard work yet we seem to make it harder because we “freeze” our understanding of it.
We hang on to all the legacies built up around the existing innovation system, we manage innovation in efficient and expected ways, yet is is often clearly not predictable, it often remains uncertain even when it arrives in the market place to be judged by the consumer. What we design in organizations is far too rigid and not highly adaptive and that is not reflecting the speed of response we need in facing up to more volatile markets today.
We need to keep checking back on what we do in our innovation activities to find the ‘sweet spot’ of customer needs and why, where and what they see value in and then how ‘we’ can design and respond to this evolving need. We need to be highly adaptive. We need a change, we are facing such constantly changing environments and challenges. We need to recognize the future is going to be totally different from the past.
Becoming adaptive in organizations that are often highly rigid and standardized is so conflicting, so different, you must separate the two that many are arguing even stronger today than ever require a dual innovation process or organization design.
I keep in constant need to “sharpen the translation points of innovation“. I’ve reflected on this and have determined five broad themes of innovation that radically alters the way we design our innovation processes and where I have a place to play and advise upon. These are:
- Exploring innovation and pattern recognition through more facilitated conversations and investigation designing pathways, roadmaps, blueprints. These are more expeditions of discovery with a shared intent to alter the thinking and understanding around innovation.
- Structuring for Asset Orchestration. This is built on the intent that you must orchestrate the capabilities constantly, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the final result and then rebuild them specifically for the next requirement or solution need. For me to manage and orchestrate means to lead, to frame, conduct and set the tempo but it is constantly changing and for that we need to be far more adaptive and fluid in our asset deployments.
- Aligning People, Technology, and Innovation in Design. While experimentation speeds the time to a viable business innovation, it does not necessarily lead immediately to the kind of large-scale growth or increased market share that are usually the barometers of performance in the core business. It is the “combination effect” of building this alignment between people, technology that is evolving at increasing speed and complexity and innovation, in the way it responds and achieves the engagement
- Impact and Intensity becomes the new mantra. We need to be more agile, iterative, to be encouraged to be experimenting and exploring. Our world is shifting from scalable efficiency to scalable learning. It is the degrees of adoption, the investments made, the multiple levels of activities and the focus of the intensity given to building capabilities to innovate will yield the eventual impact. Execution and Value Delivery needs to drive the whole innovation process.
- Exploring and Aligning. Here I am pushing for a new management model where we are pushing to seek increasing ‘fusion’ but still want degree’s of separation, we are seeking out ‘flows’ through new knowledge to break down barriers that restrict new insights so as to turn these into new value creation, and we are encouraged to seek out and establish a higher ‘fluidity’ in what we do and reduce the rigidity we presently have in place in our current organizations.We need to operate in ‘dual minds’ and structures is at last constantly striving for the innovation balance: between exploring and exploiting.
Nothing is standing still anymore, it is evolving constantly and we equally need to design our innovation to adapt to this new innovation era.
|
The outlook for the second half of 2017 reflects the “new digital-led normal,” as businesses continue to adapt technologies to compete on an increasingly crucial user experience. What more can we expect? Read on for seven sizzling digital trends to follow for the second half of 2017.
- Battling Bad Bots - After years of increased awareness about ad fraud, the industry appeared to see signs of progress in early 2017. The latest ANA and White Ops baseline study estimated a 10% reduction in losses due to bot fraud in late 2017 and said media agencies had improved controls on programmatic buys. That’s all very promising, but don’t expect the industry to claim victory and lower its guard. Experts are quick to point out that bad actors test and learn.
- Focus On Image Recognition - If 2017 is the year when voice-recognition goes mainstream with Alexa and Siri running the connected home, it’s also the start of a new trend to leverage the mobile phone’s camera and combine image recognition with all kinds of artificial intelligence.
- Now You See It … - ... Now you don’t. In expectation of the release of Google Lens, many platforms are experimenting with augmented reality applications. AR is still not quite ready for prime time, but many groups are testing it and getting ready to go.
- VR Now Just One Of The Gang - After the initial rush, reality has set in—on virtual reality. At the 2017 NewFronts, virtual reality was presented as just one more tool in the toolbox; a VR capability was table stakes but not the top priority for content development. Rather, VR’s focus has shifted to the delicacies of creating content and where it is appropriate, with less focus on the novelty of showing off the technology.
- Pour Some Content On Me - In 2017, cooperation and joint ventures between players—even competing ones—is the way to go. Many platforms stress that the demands of producing quality content for multiple channels and adopting multiple technologies are often more than one company can handle.
- It’s (A)Live! - Live-streaming content is all the rage. Nearly every platform presenting at NewFronts launched or expanded live video content via the various social media platforms, such as Facebook Live and Twitter feeds, or on their own.
- Personalization Gets Emotional - Between the drumbeat of resistance to the new administration in the U.S., the anti-Brexit backlash in the latest British election, and the results of the French election, the polarization of Western society seems to have no end in sight. In this fractious environment, personalization isn’t just about demographics or even context anymore, experts said. It’s about appealing to belief. These days, new technologies enable AI to judge the flavor of content online based on its emotional appeal and tone, opening the door to targeting based on attitudes and emotion.
No comments:
Post a Comment