Innovative strategy is more than passion
Posted by Grant Brewer on 08 Aug 2007
It is not unusual to see organisations that are struggling because they allow the passion and the belief in a new idea to masquerade as strategy. It is true that new ideas will almost always fail unless someone has the passion and the belief in the idea to stay with it through all the challenges. However, fresh ideas and people that are passionate about them are not uncommon, yet successful businesses built on these same ideas are a lot less common.
Innovation is more than ideas. Re-inventing an industry or a product category takes more than research and a fresh take on the business model. Managing innovation and implementing new business models is notoriously difficult -- regardless of whether you're an established business, a new business unit or a start up company. It is a common mistake to assume that sheer passion and belief will bring a strategy to life. New ideas need the passion and the belief -- they also need good strategy, leadership and implementation.
It is not unusual to see organisations that are struggling because they allow the passion and the belief in a new idea to masquerade as strategy. It is true that new ideas will almost always fail unless someone has the passion and the belief in the idea to stay with it through all the challenges. However, fresh ideas and people that are passionate about them are not uncommon, yet successful businesses built on these same ideas are a lot less common.
Innovation is more than ideas; it is certainly different to research & development. Re-inventing an industry or a product category takes more than research and a fresh take on the business model. Managing innovation and implementing new business models is notoriously difficult — regardless of whether you're an established business, a new business unit or a start up company.
It is the knowledge of how to turn that idea into reality that counts. This requires a good operational sense, and this is where strategy gets messy, and the perfect plan becomes a little less perfect. Nothing is as straight-forward as it seems in the initial idea: It always takes longer; it is always more intricate; and when it comes to the inevitable technology enablement, it is more complex than you will originally think. The progress made in technology over the last two decades has made it common for people to under-estimate the time and cost of creating or even implementing business software platforms. Generally speaking, it is much more complicated than most people imagine to implement business technology platforms.
What is leadership?
What is leadership when innovating and leading the development of new ideas? When passion and belief stand in the way of effective strategy innovation, these leadership characteristics might help.
Find the courage to lead. This requires that you believe in and understand yourself. Sometimes this is referred to as self-awareness or as a part of emotional intelligence. You’re going to need this self-awareness if you’re going to trust yourself. Having the courage to lead doesn’t mean you don’t have doubts or experience challenges. But it does mean that you have the ability to make decisions and rise above your doubts, dealing with the risks and leading yourself and the team step by step toward the future. And you will need to trust yourself because very little will work out exactly as you planned and their is almost never a perfect time to launch a business or to implement a product change. It isn't any good having a perfect plan, but no business. Managing risk, matching it to timing and to the creation of an effective set of business processes is what leadership is about.
A part of understanding yourself is to find your own way: identifying what you do well, know what you love, and play to your strengths. Find people to collaborate with that are a good match for you: they might be good at the things that you're not and that might complement your strengths. Identifying who you can work with is more important that you might think. Some management literature leaves the impression that you should simply work with the most talented people you can find, but this isn't entirely true — you also need to be able to work with your team. Personality and working styles needs to match. Sheer intellect isn't enough if your team can't communicate, can't understand each other or doesn't trust each other.
Get organised
Good strategy comes from order. Order doesn’t mean simple, not does it mean a linear sequence of activities. Business management is a complex non-linear system, but this can still shows a kind of order (read more on mathematics if this idea seems strange). Good leaders are organised. We don’t all need to follow the same system to get organised, but it is uncommon to find an effective business leader that hasn’t found their own way of creating order and getting organised. If you’ve got no idea where to start, take a look at the Getting Things Done Framework by David Allen.
In a broader sense, getting organise means learning how to project manage. If you're leading a team in an innovation implementation, then more than than ever the buck stops with you and you will need to manage the idea through its implementation — sometimes dragging the team and the ideas kicking and screaming into reality.
Most projects don’t, in my experience, following the straight forward waterfall progression that matches the way activities are often shown on Gantt chart. Gantt charts and other project diagrams or documents are an abstraction: they allow the team to understand the issue and provide different views on the project activities. Gantt charts are not the project — so make sure you’re managing the project and not the Gantt chart. The project is the actual doing of the tasks and the day to day dealing with the inter-relationship of the issues. Project management is the ability to adapt to the changing landscape of requirements and issues, whilst keeping the team focused on its overall objective.
Good leaders know that to manage a new innovation into the market they need to get into the detailed project management. The really talented, know intuitively how to get into just enough detail to be effective whilst not micro–managing the team.
Turning strategy into real business
Remind yourself what you probably already know about strategy: that strategy is a map to the future — the objective is actually being in business, not fine tuning the strategy. As difficult as it was to let go of the training wheels when you learnt to ride a bicycle, at some point you have to stop refining the strategy and start getting into business.
Step back from your strategy and ask yourself whether other team members could follow the map or whether they even know the details of the map. It is a very common mistake to assume that the entire team or business unit understand the nuances of the strategy and know how they should act and how they should make decisions to keep in the right direction.
It is a even more common mistake to assume that sheer passion and belief will bring a strategy to life. New ideas need the passion and the belief — they also need good implementation.
Innovative strategy is more than passion was published as Strategy #51 in August 2007.
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Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
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implementation (10) | strategy (8) | leadership (7) | innovation (3) | management (3) | change (3) | project portfolio (1) | passion (1)
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