As A Leader You Feel Ready, But Ready For What? - Leadership and Change

One of my favorite quotes is from an executive in Europe who said, “You feel ready, but ready for what?” 

His question addressed the angst of increasingly more leaders. Many leaders and small business owners tell me that they feel ill-prepared for today’s complex environment. With increased connectivity come strong and too often unknown interdependencies. For this reason, the ultimate result of these decisions has been poorly understood. 

Nevertheless, decisions must be made. 

As leaders turn their attention to growth strategies many have told us their success depends on doubling their revenue over the next five years. The services that contribute to the lion’s share of their revenue today will be the second largest source of revenue in five years. Finding new growth strategies is not easy in a complex and uncertain environment.

This means leaders must shake up their business models, old ways of thinking, and long held assumptions. They have to address what customers now care about and reassess engagement with employees to create optimal value. 

Leaders must learn to be comfortable with complexity and uncertainty. They have to see disruption in one form or another as an opportunity. 

Another leader said, “The Great recession has been a wakeup call. It felt like looking in the dark with no light at the end of the tunnel.” 

So, what can you do? Create a nimble and adaptive organization. One not disrupted by complexity. Innovate your management and leadership styles for an unconventional new normal. Create new approaches to better understand customers and engage employees. 

 

 

For Some of the World’s Poor, Hope Comes Via Design and Innovation

It is late. About 12:10 in Colorado Springs. I am fascinated by the social and business ramifications associated with Mike Kimmelman's New York Times story on design and technology through "Why didn't someone think of this before" solutions. The photos below provide a multitude of implicit ways to better the world locally. Indeed Kimmelman’s article is awe inspiring not from the standpoint of observation but transformative participation. Which is the point. 

Below a renovated public walkway, along the canal in Bangkok, where residents are helping to design cleaner places to live. With families in flimsy homes on stilts above polluted waters, architects from nearby Sripatum University were enlisted to devise row houses, detached houses and semidetached houses, along the lines of what residents said they wanted.

via nytimes.com

In the photo above the solution is absolutely simple. They have enriched a community. That enriches familes. Do you think the value of the improvements have been achieved? 

A community cooker is fueled by refuse that residents collect in return for time using the oven.

A few solutions:

1. a filtered drinking straw that prevents the spread of typhoid and cholera
2. a bamboo treadle pump that helps poor farmers in Cambodia and India extract groundwater during the dry seasons
3. The Q Drum, a doughnut-shaped plastic container, easily rolled, even long distances by children, which is used to transport up to 13 gallons of water.  I suggest reading this article in entirety via New York Times.

 Consulting, Speaking & Coaching. Driving Growth through Innovation  

Innothink Group is a strategic management and innovation consultancy. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting over a third of our fees at risk subject o hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships. 

For speaking, coaching or consulting inquiries contact: 

CEO Jim Woods

+1 719- 649-4118

Christian Conte: Football Fanatics Merger - Jacksonville Business Journal

Fanatics Inc. has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire all the outstanding shares of another multi-channel sports products retailer for an aggregate transaction value of $183 million.

The deal with Dreams    Dreams Latest from The Business Journals Follow this company Inc. (NYSE Amex: DRJ) based in Plantation is for $3.45 per share in cash, taking into account $25 million of outstanding debt, according to a company press release. The deal is a 32 percent premium over Dreams’ closing share price of $2.61 April 13.

The deal is subject to customary closing conditions, including the approval of Dreams’ shareholders and regulatory approvals, but is expected to close in the third quarter.

The merger allows Fanatics to accelerate investments in product assortment, mobile and e-commerce technology and a regional fulfillment infrastructure, said Fanatics CEO Alan Trager.

“Today is an exciting day for all sports fans,” said Trager. “We are bringing together two of the most passionate management teams in licensed sports products.”

Fanatics, based in Jacksonville, is an online retailer specializing in sports leagues and teams merchandise. The company was started by two brothers as a brick and mortar retail shop in 1995 to sell Jacksonville Jaguars merchandise. The company continues to operate two stores called Football Fanatics in The Avenues and Orange Park malls.

Fanatics was acquired by GSI Commerce in March of 2011 and then in June of 2011, after GSI Commerce was acquired by eBay Inc, was spun out as a standalone business owned by Kynetic, a Michael Rubin company which also owns Rue La La and ShopRunner.

Christian covers banking and finance, insurance, retail and restaurants and law

via bizjournals.com

Want to increase growth and avoid losses? Want to out compete your competitiors? Want to bring new products and services to market faster? Want to be more agile? Contact Innovation and Growth Speaker Jim Woods. Jim works confidentially with start ups, governments as well as profit and for profit enterprises.

Visit our website:www.innothinkgroup.com Executive and Business Coaching: http://ow.ly/anBpK

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com 

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The 5 best books on Innovation EVER by Scott Berkun

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Before I share the list of the 5 best books on innovation, here’s a list of 5 things you need to know before reading that list. It’s worth it. I promise.

1. There are 100s of books on innovation. Most are terrifyingly (and ironically) boring. They’re bought to be placed, unread, on office shelves so people can pretend they’re smart. These books are cliché in the worst way, cherry picking trendy examples and building worlds of junk theories around them, theories the heroes in the cherry picked examples didn’t even use. Innovation is a junk word, and there are many junk books.
2. It’s not clear why anyone should read a book about innovation. There’s little evidence people we’d call creative got that way by reading a particular book. Most skills in life are only acquired by work, and to be more creative means to create and learn, rather than merely read.
3. I carefully studied over 60 books, related to creativity, invention and managing creativity in others during research for my bestseller, The Myths of Innovation (research that included teaching a course on creativity at the University of Washington – syllabus). And I’ve read more books before and after than project. I even organized the books I studied in an innovative way for readers. I’ve been studying creativity in many forms for a long time and my list reflects wide and deep reading.
4. People looking for a book on innovation often make the mistake of compressing the many sloppy uses of the word into a single thing, and expect one book to excel at teaching people how to: 1) Generate ideas and invent things 2) Design and ship good products 3) Run a successful entrepreneurial business. These are very different skills, possibly even different subjects.
5. These 3 skills are rare. It’s insanely rare for one person to have two, much less three of them. It’s improbable any book could single-handedly give you one of these skills, much less all three.  Any book claiming to do any of this is lying to you.

There. All done.

I can confidently say if you only read 5 books these are the ones to read and re-read:

1. Innovation and Entrepreneurship, by Peter Drucker.  Drucker is profound, clear, concise and memorable. He puts modern business writers to shame with his clarity. This short books encapsulates all of the theory you need to think about starting a business, and what it will take to find, develop, launch and grow product ideas. (Also see,  The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki, and if you work in the tech-sector, Founders at Work is a must-read)
2. Thinkertoys,  Michael Michalko. There are many books with exhaustive lists of methods for generating ideas. This is one of them. The misconception is that idea generation is the hard part, which it rarely is. But for those looking for games, tactics and methods to generate ideas this is a great place to start. (Also see, Are your Lights on?, by Gause and Weinberg).
3. Dear Theo, By Vincent Van Gogh (& Irving Stone).  Before you dismiss this one, consider this: what we call passion in the business world, is passion for profit. What if there was no profit motive? How much passion would our heroes, like Edison and Jobs, have had for the ideas alone? To learn about the deepest commitment to ideas you have to study artists. There are no better stories of passion than great artists pursuing their creative visions against all odds and Van Gogh’s letters are a fantastic encapsulation of commitment, vision, dedication, brilliance, work ethic and madness, all traits any creator or entrepreneur should understand. (Also see, The Agony and the Ecstasy, for a similar book about Michelangelo).
4.  They all laughed, Ira Flatow. History is biased in that we retroactively inject purpose and narrative structure into stories of invention, so that they make more sense to us in the present. But the real history of invention and discovery is messy, weird, frustrating and surprising. This book documents how frustrating it usually is to have a great idea in a mediocre world. (Also see,Connections, by James Burke – all episodes of the documentary based on the book are free online).
5. Brain Rules, John Medina. I’ve read many books about intelligence and neuroscience – they’re mostly pseudo-fluff, filled with the latest theories and shocking claims, but lead to no tangible improvement in how you use what’s between your ears. Brain Rules is the book to read about how to use your brain to better use your brain. While it’s not strictly about creativity, show me a creative person who didn’t use their brain well (See my full review of Brain Rules here).

There. Have fun.
Most of these books are old. Well guess what? Innovation and creativity are old too. The best advice is not necessarily the newest, despite our compulsive neophilia. Just be glad I didn’t recommend Vitruvius’ ten books on architecture (which happens to be one of the only sources for the story of Archimedes and ‘Eureka‘).

But I implore you to do more than read. Like learning to play guitar, you can only learn so much from books. You must get to work yourself. It doesn’t matter what you make, but go make something. And when you finish, think about how to make it better and try again. This is the only thing that will make you more creative: the practice of making things. And only then can what you learn from books matter. via scottberkun.com

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective hypercompetition strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.   


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