Friday, December 07, 2012

Stress

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Friday, December 29, 2006

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Saturday, December 31, 2005

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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Innovation: Lessons learned

Lesson two: Innovation does not equal technology

Politicians usually equal innovation to science and technology.
The process of innovation however is a process that revolves around people. At the root of this process are the circumstances in which people are at work as well as the conditions in which the population at large lives in a country. Some circumstances are beneficial to the innovation process others are not. Or at its worst, circumstances may be counterproductive.

The synthesis the most political statements and plans come down to, is an equation like this:
high quality education => scientists => technology => new products

Flaws in the equation
This equation not only leaves out the vast majority of the population (i.e. non-scientists), it invariably accepts that the ultimate goal is limited to the development of new products.

A strong case can be made that
> the number of countries that are innovating is increasing
> there is more and faster imitation by honest or dishonest competitors
> the effort that is needed for innovation, is increasing
Each of this findings is an extra reason to not restrict the innovation process to researchers and scientists, but to involve the entire population.

Why is this? It is a matter of "need for speed":
1. Also non-scientists need to contribute by expressing their ideas for improvement and renewal.
2. At the end of the innovation process, the population as such constitutes the market demand. The more involved, the better demand will be understood.
3. The more involved in the process, the earlier people will adopt innovations thus speeding up the process.
4. Competition between innovators speeds up the process.

Conditions
Therefore, an environment that fosters innovation needs:
> researchers and scientists as well as non-scientists (as input to the process)
> a context encouraging investment in innovating activities ( political)
> market demand (customers, preferably the entire population)
> a necessary level of competition within and between innovative organisations
> politicians that correctly understand the dynamics of innovation within a society
> last but not least: a sufficiently high quality of leadership and managerial staff able to engage every person in the company

posted by es @ 16:39 0 comments

Friday, November 18, 2005

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Change, Innovation, Knowledge work, Employees as Assets

In Memoriam Peter F. Drucker

On the 11th of November, eight days from his 96th birthday, Peter Drucker passed away at his home in California. Thinking of him I associate his name to the names of Einstein and Freud. For me, ever since my years at university he has always been there. At times he was tough study material, a source of insight or source of inspiration. To me he was not a writer but a man who had so much to say over so many decades, that he couldn't but put his thoughts on paper. (Here you can find a list of Drucker's books.) (picture AP)


His 39th book, "The Effective Executive in Action. A Journal for getting the right things done" will be released next January. Almost as if he knew it would be his last book, he builds upon a very popular book of his that was published forty years ago in 1966 called "The Effective Executive". It couldn't have been more symbolic for his thinking. Drucker knew that thriving organizations depend on effective executives.

All his life he tried to make us understand what that means. He described his vision from multiple vantage points and along this route he constructed Modern Management Theory. He even 'handcrafted' the necessary building blocks to do so. He pointed to leadership, showed us innovation, explained us change, taught us entrepreneurship and stressed the importance of knowledge. And most of all he kept painstakingly going on clarifying his ultimate message that the source of these building blocks is: people.

Apparently this is a message that is extremely difficult to understand or there are extremely few effective executives. To make his message come across, Drucker gave us no less than eighteen books on the profession of management. And still there may be timeliness to his ideas and writings. Not because Drucker did predictions, but because the world does such a bad job in applying his ideas.

Drucker was considered a visionary because he understood the single most basic rule in business and management: employees are the key to success. In one word: people. All the rest follows from that because every decision, every idea, strategy, marketing plan, innovation and so on are thought of, conceived, decided and executed by people.

Peter Drucker still moves people around the world. But when will corporate myopia be replaced by real understanding of this man's message?

Who can take such a man's place?

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posted by es @ 16:19 0 comments

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Profititable Growth and Innovation

In their third ‘Leading Innovations Competition’ of BoozAllenHamilton, The Four Sources of Intelligent Innovation framework came out as one of the winners. See:http://www.leading-innovations.com/lic05-home/lic03

“In the next decade, innovation will supplant cost reduction and mergers and acquisitions as the competitive battleground. Ninety percent of executives recently surveyed by Booz Allen Hamilton say that the introduction of new products and services is crucial to profitable growth. On average, they aim to improve their innovation performance by 30 percent in the next three years.” BAH say.

In my opinion, innovation of some kind is the only “competitive battleground”. And every kind of innovation is linked to people. People have ideas.

Surveyed executives explain that they have “to balance the analytical rigor of the control regime with a softer side encompassing creativity, curiosity, pattern recognition, cultural sensitivity, leadership, agility, and a learning organization”. Each and every softer side aspect, being a capability of people. BoozAllenHamilton call it “intelligent innovation”. Which probably indicates there must be some kind of dumb innovation too.

The four major sources of intelligent innovation are called:

· customer insight (i.e. what it says)

· global networking (i.e. leverage all knowledge available)

· future foresight (i.e. create a picture of the future)

· innovation organization (i.e. unlock innovation potential within the organization)

As a result of exploiting these four sources, a company improved its organic growth rate and operating cash flow by 50 percent.

Is this four sources model really new? Is it really different from what we all know? Is this not common sense? Of course it is.

Yet it seems it doesn’t hurt to remember what many of us seem to have forgotten.

Here: http://www.strategy-business.com/enewsarticle/enews103105 you can read the strategy+business article that calls the model an “impressive new concept”.

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posted by es @ 16:54 0 comments

Friday, October 28, 2005

Why use an executive coach?

The days that using an executive coach was seen as an unfair advantage are far behind us. Somehow, providing human support to an executive was seen as unfair, while providing technical or IT support was not. Another criticism was that it cost money: it were the higher up people in a company, the ones with bigger budgets that could afford to “share” their responsibilities with someone else.

Today, not only do we know that all the 'big people' have their own coaches, mentors, 'gurus', counsellors or wise person, we also came to understand that coaching is not an expense, in fact it yields.

As from our findings, almost no other investment your company can make may bring as high a return as getting engagement from your human capital.

Benefits of using executive coaching

In our coaching practice defining outcome measures and periodic measurement are standard ‘procedure’. The types of bottom line results that can be achieved through coaching are varied and numerous. For the organisation headed by the executive (be it the entire company or a division or department) we found:

v increase of productivity

v increase of net profits

v reduced absenteeism and employee turnover

v increase of turnover through both existing and newly developed products/services

v increase of market share and competitiveness

Less tangible benefits and benefits on the individual and personal level,as well for the executive in question as for his/her collaborators include:

v increase of employee morale, and employee commitment

v newly acquired skills and abilities

v new career steps and career fast tracking

v improved communication lines and two-way feed back

v enhanced corporate image

v managers getting head hunted for skills and achievements acquired through coaching

Setting of executive coaching

Executive coaching sets a scene and rolls out a ‘program’ to:

  • provide a confidential and supportive environment fostering self-knowledge and self-development
  • develop awareness of and insight in co-workers’ behaviour and motivational processes for greater success
  • understand coachee’s own drives and behavioural patterns affecting decision-making, ensuring that these are adequately aligned to business as well as personal goals
  • challenge thinking and problem-solving focusing causal relationships and stretching goal-setting.
  • develop learning and communication style, ensuring clear and effective communication.
  • provide a high value resource for organisations that are serious about building hgh performance teams
  • identify and address obstacles to achieving business or personal objectives
  • make your employees aware of how customers (internal as well as external) view your organisation and help your employees to develop attitudes creating positive customer experiences
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posted by es @ 18:33 0 comments