Tag: Business
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To Stretch or not to Stretch: How stretch goals can help build an innovative culture.
The use of stretch goals is critical to building an innovative culture and driving breakthrough performance year after year. Why? You can’t drive a business breakthrough with incremental progress and modest aspirations. A sky-high goal is needed that will require an organization to invent a new solution. Even when the stretch goals are not achieved,…
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Building an Innovative Culture: 8 Key Components
Innovation can be built into a Corporate Culture. By incorporating eight key components, you will be able to build a highly focused, pragmatic Perpetual Innovation Machine that will help your organization continually achieve breakthrough performance. Here’s a quick rundown. 1) A sharp focus on your top business priority. Let’s face it. All of the result measures you…
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Innovation, Benchmarking & the 5 Stages of Grieving
92% of executives surveyed as part of the “GE Global Innovation Barometer 2012” agreed that innovation is the main lever to create a more competitive economy. Steven Johnson identifies 7 key principles that are a catalyst for innovation in his book “Where Good Ideas Come From“, 2 of which I’ve noted below: seizing existing components or…
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Front Line Employees Hold the Key to Long Term Growth
The strong correlation between Long Term Growth and Employee Satisfaction I’d like to start this post by asking three quick questions. They all relate to important issues that affect your business. When was the last time you were delighted when you did business with a service company? What role did an employee of that company…
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Innovation and “Stealing Shamelessly”
Creating an innovative culture starts with creating an open culture. An open culture is accepting of ideas regardless of their source – other companies, industries, people – and is willing to implement what they have learned to improve their own performance. A great illustration of this concept from the greatest innovator of our time, Steve Jobs . . . . he obviously…
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The Difference Between Service, Satisfaction, & Loyalty
In an attempt to create a loyal following, Leaders are often disappointed because they confuse the concepts of Service, Satisfaction, and Loyalty. While error-free service and pleasant interactions are key components to any product offering, loyal customers are the only ones that can help you grow your business (see Raising the Bar on Customer Satisfaction http://wp.me/p28Mqi-7) and create…
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12 Observations on Leading
I had a mentor that strongly encouraged all of his front line managers to consciously develop and formulate a personal philosophy of leadership. He saw it as his mission to teach and develop; and he would provide book excerpts, quotes, and lessons learned that he used to develop his own philosophy. One of the lists that…
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Top 8 Distinctions between Manager and Leader
Warren Bennis once created a whole list of distinctions between manager and leader, some of the following may be helpful. The manager administers, the leader innovates The manager is a copy, the leader is an original The manager maintains, the leader develops The manager focuses on systems and structure, the leader focuses on people The…
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Leadership Cornerstone: Integrity of Character
“The final proof of the sincerity and seriousness of management is an uncompromising emphasis on integrity of character. For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets the example and is imitated. Character is not something a man can acquire. If he does not bring it to the job, he…