Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a company innovative – and how do we grow our businesses to encourage and support innovation within our organization.
Similar to a professional sports team, we understand that in order to win, we must manage our teams through ever-changing circumstances. Day-to-day, week-to-week and year-to-year our business landscape can look very different. We must also play on our strengths and our opponents weakness, change game plans on-the-fly, memorize the playbook but be ready to toss it aside and call a brand new plan if needed in order to shift and adjust midstream. The teams who can do all that over an entire grueling season are crowned the victors.
I would argue that leading an innovative business model is at least as challenging as managing a professional sports team. Despite that realization, so many companies still think they can instill innovation without a playbook or plan. They are met with a cold, hard fact: what worked in the past may not work moving forward – its time to invent some new plays.
One of the best examples of business innovation I’ve ever read about was this article that was assigned reading for my recent Yale School of Management course. This is a wonderful article dives deeply into the innovative business model invented by visionary Bill Gore some fifty years ago. I encourage you to read this article and because there is so much good stuff in it that my trying to summarize its key points would be as lengthy as just taking the few minutes to read it yourself. You will immediately begin thinking about – as I did – what in this model can I being implementing in my business? And then, let’s discuss!
“(Bill Gore) knew that if you can’t engage your associates, if they don’t feel they can make a difference, if they don’t feel valued for what they bring to the business, and if they aren’t encouraged to collaborate and share their knowledge, you won’t get innovation.” ~Terri Kelly, CEO, Gore
I look forward to hearing what you think. Is there anything you wish to begin incorporating right away? What surprised you the most?
~Amy
