Over my career, I’ve had the pleasure of working with highly intelligent, thoughtful, and committed leaders at all levels of the organization. I’d be hard-pressed in fact, to think of a time over the past 30 years, when I’ve worked with individuals who were not so. Why then is it that in some of the organizations, most of these, leading Fortune 500 Companies, the Companies consistently did well and over-achieved vs. plan on revenues and operating profits, regardless of economic and competitive conditions, while others did not? There are many reasons including leadership vision and courage and financial backing from stakeholders. One not often cited, and perhaps equally important though is an environment conducive for unleashing employee imagination.
Ideas for making and/or saving an organization exist at all levels of an organization and in every organization. Success in finding, nurturing, and harvesting these ideas though is what truly differentiates great companies that thrive in good times and bad from those that only do well when the economy is doing well.
The art is to create the conditions for bringing great ideas into the light of day. Firms such as Pixar, Apple, 3M and Procter & Gamble excel at this. They understand that their success comes in part from fine-tuning existing products and services through product family extensions and re-purposing existing products for different markets. Importantly though, they understand that a significant portion of their success comes from new products introduced in the past ten years.
So…how do these firms create the conditions for success. Well, here are some things that all CEOs interested in a greater ROI where ROI = Return On Imagination, should consider:
1. Is idea generation hard-wired into your organization’s DNA? Does your mission statement contain a word like “Create”, “Innovate”, “Revolutionize”, “Lead”, “Imagine”?
2. Do your core values or guiding principles mention creativity, idea generation, innovation, and the like, and does your culture back this up in terms of demonstrable proof that you live this value?
3. Does your strategy include a component on business development, where a portion of future revenues (and investments) are allocated to “new” products, whether via in-house R&D, or a combination of in-house R&D and an acquisition strategy?
4. Do you have a role or roles assigned to lead ROI? This can be all leaders in the organization, with a component of their responsibilities including a focus on ROI, as well as or in its stead, a role such as “Chief Scientist”; “Head of R&D”, “Head of Creative”.
5. Have you set up the grey areas of organization design, which are not the formal functional and geographic organizational structures but rather cross-functional teams, who come together for temporary projects; shared common customer or product needs, and which are mostly self-managed, and impermanent?
6. Does your top leadership empower and give importance (in terms of support and aligned actions) to these cross-functional teams?
7. Do you take the risk of saying yes to ideas, knowing that not all will be successful, and do you create conditions for failure being as important as success, so long as the learning leads to a better ROI in future?
ROI is one of the most important concepts for an organization looking to differentiate itself from its peers and create sustainable competitive advantage and success to consider. And it need not be expensive.
To get started, simply make ROI a priority for your organization, and invest your time in nurturing a culture where ideas are welcomed and implemented.