Taking a Leaf Out of Your Childhood in Your Professional Life

The way we develop as children can greatly impact the way in which we conduct ourselves as adults. Our early experiences and discoveries have a significant influence on the growth of various personality traits, such as leadership, the ability to work as part of a team and communication, which can have a big impact on our professional lives. In certain situations, perhaps if we’re struggling with a particular aspect of our job, it can be worth adopting the same sort of approaches we did when we were children. It can show us a new, potentially better way of doing our jobs and have a real impact on our professional lives and, as a knock-on, the growth of our businesses. Imagination Our imagination knows no limits when we’re children – whether it’s something as simple as imagining that the floor is actually red-hot lava or a fully imagined re-enactment of battles from Peter Pan or Robin Hood, we can imagine anything, exercising our creativity and having fun at the same time. Although you might not be in the sort of job that requires you to be overly creative on a regular basis, even the most repetitive tasks can be made more fun and improved in terms of their effectiveness when you use your imagination. Communication While you might not remember it, your parents probably have a few well-worn anecdotes about the time you innocently told Grandma that you thought her new shoes were really ugly, or the time you told your little brother Father Christmas didn’t exist and made him cry. To read full blog visit >> Taking a Leaf Out of Your Childhood in Your Professional Life Also read about Online Learning Innovation Programs and its related Innovation Preocess

Try Using the Institutional Yes

When new ideas are voiced in your company is the typical response ‘yes but…’? If so, you’re really saying ‘No’ and closing the door on new ideas and open-minded employees. Paul Sloane says we could all learn a lesson from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos by implementing the Institutional Yes.

One of the exercises on my Creative Leadership workshop runs like this. People in pairs have short conversations. In the first conversation one person makes a suggestion for something new that could be done for customers (say). The second person replies with an objection. They start their sentence, ‘Yes but….’ The first person then rebuts the objection with another sentence starting.

The results are instructive. Typically the first conversation spirals down into an argument with no agreement. In real life the more powerful person would usually win.

“When we say, ‘Yes but….’ we are really saying, ‘No.”

The typical responses to a creative suggestion might be:

• Yes but it would cost too much.
• Yes but the boss would never agree to that.
• Yes but we are too busy right now.
• Yes but we tried something similar last year and it did not work.
  

Read full Article Here>> Try Using the Institutional Yes

Also Read about Online Learning Training Programs at Innovation Management.

Follow the Crowd or Create the Marketplace

It’s follow my leader time for the world’s stock markets. Concerns over the state of the Chinese economy have seen markets plunge into freefall, only for some to bounce upwards again a few hours later. At the time of writing, markets are still in flux with analysts divided on the eventual outcome.

The impartial observer may wonder why the sudden panic, why when statistics and warning signs have pointed to areas of concern for a period of time the markets have suddenly moved from apparent inactivity to violent action. This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it confined to the world stock markets. In fact, the history of business could easily be written in terms of a giant game of follow my leader.

What’s right for you?

The fact is that like so much else in life different ideas work for different organisations. And whilst the principal may be sound and may be entirely appropriate at a headline level, it is how leaders shape the basic idea to work for their organisation that makes the difference between boosting business success and yet another change failure.

“Innovation is not a one size fits all solution. “

The innovation roadmap

One of the best ways to make sure that you are creating a solution which is right for your organisation, rather than simply a copy of someone else’s idea, is to take time at the outset to really understand where your business currently stands. This innovation cultural assessment should employ a mix of qualitative and quantitative assessments which are designed to enable the leadership to not only understand the current level of innovation maturity but also to gauge areas such as employee engagement.

To read full blog about Follow the Crowd or Create the Marketplace visit Innovation Management

Design Thinking + Business Model Innovation

There has been a lot of buzz around designing new and innovative business models. But what does it mean to design a new business model? How do you apply design thinking to business model innovation?A lot has been said and written about what design thinking is, so I will not go there. Instead, I will take a typical design thinking process and show you how it can be applied to business model design.

As the design firm IDEO has been one of the early advocates of design thinking, let us use one of their design thinking processes as outlined in the Design Thinking for Educators Handbook.


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Visioning – 7 Essential Characteristics

The process of visioning may seem both daunting and mysterious. Indeed, it is in no way a straightforward method and there are always rocky rapids to navigate. An understanding of the make-up of this journey will create better results for this process to be a success.

Visioning – the process of coming up with breakthrough ideas – is often assumed to be an isolated and instantaneous affair. We have images of the isolated creative genius experiencing a moment of eureka! in the bathtub, or a great vision while fasting in the desert

If creative leadership can enable their teams to work and interact in an open, connected network, this significantly increases the chance of these ‘lucky’ moments. We know that being an extravert does not correlate with being creative, but being connected does.

It is a path but not a straight one

If visioning is a path rather than a moment it is anything but a straight deductive, linear process to a certain outcome. Instead it is a process that ebbs and flows, that often feels like two steps forward and one step back, sometimes even more steps back.
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Don’t Be Afraid of Upsetting People – A Negative Reaction is Better than no Reaction

South Park is a highly successful cartoon sitcom created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central TV network. The show was launched in 1997 and quickly became notorious for its rude language, minimalist characters and black, surreal satire. It was aimed at an adult audience and poked fun at a wide range of topical or taboo subjects. South Park has received many accolades, including five Primetime Emmy Awards. It is the third longest-running cartoon series in the U.S. behind The Simpsons and Arthur. Yet it was very nearly cancelled when initial tests showed that most people did not like it.

Parker and Stone met at a film class at the University of Colorado in 1992. They developed a number of humorous animated productions and came to the attention of a Comedy Central executive who commissioned a pilot episode for a proposed animated series. The pair spent three months creating the pilot episode which was called, ‘Cartman Gets an Anal Probe’. When it was shown to test audiences the results were dire. It provoked a strong reaction – mostly negative. The majority of viewers disliked it and it was particularly unpopular with women. However, a minority audience, mainly young men, really liked it.

The household goods giant Reckitt Benckiser developed a new cleaning product. Before launching the product they carried out consumer tests. Most consumers in the tests did not like the product but a minority (often men) really liked it.

“Bland products upset no-one but delight no-one and they get lost in the welter of goods on offer. “

It is no good launching a ‘me too’ product which is similar to or even slightly better than most other products on the market. As Seth Godin stresses in his book, Purple Cow, it is more important to be different than to be better.

To read full blog about Don’t Be Afraid of Upsetting People – A Negative Reaction is Better than no Reaction visit Innovation Management.

Intuition and Deliberation for Better Decision-Making

We live in an age of change and uncertainty. For businesses, this means that only the most versatile survive —innovate or die. Simply adapting to the digital age is not enough: company survival requires explorative business strategies, to find new opportunities to improve and renew products and services. To attain explorative success you need a combination of both deliberate thinking and intuitive thinking. This article explores how you can balance the two.

In this article we bridge theory and practice on organizing imagination and innovation by extracting key implications and offering new insights to innovation practitioners. This article builds on The Role of Intuition and Deliberation for Exploitation and Exploration Success by Kurt Matzler, Borislav Uzelac, and Florian Bauer and explains why intuition and deliberation jointly make for better decision-making.
Rapid developments in computing have led to an ever-increasing digitization, causing unprecedented rates of change to society. We live in an age of change and uncertainty.
 The Role of Intuition and Deliberation for Exploitation and Exploration Success, examines the link between explorative and exploitative business strategies on the one hand, and intuitive and analytical deliberate thinking on the other. Its authors, Kurt Matzler, Borislav Uzelac and Florian Bauer find that:

• Intuitive and deliberate thinking are not two opposing poles of a continuum, but two intertwined modes of information processing.
• Both intuitive and deliberate decision-making are positively associated with explorative success.
  

To read full article about Intuition and Deliberation for Better Decision-Making visit Innovation Management.