Articles

201 Innovation : Thrive To Survive

As captains of our businesses how do we make sure we are making the right things happen? Whether we are a startup or have been in business for decades, whether thriving or barely surviving, whether a smooth running machine or a business on life support, it's vital to take stock of where we stand in our marketplace. Way too often we have all seen sound growing businesses, or at least that's how they appeared on the surface, suddenly seize up, go into crisis and die unexpectedly - - as ...

Article 111 : Writing A Resume

By Nick Corcodilos Resume is only one page… You have gotten some bad advice somewhere that a resume has to be kept to one page. That is an old rule that went out with typewriters and paper resumes stored in filing cabinets. A one-page resume was something that was achievable when most people only had one or two employers in their entire lifetimes. That's changed now. Employers want to know more about your experience and track record so they can make an educated decision on whether ...

151 Learning Leadership

We are very pleased to present in a series of 11 articles below the thinking of North America’s leading scholars and professionals on the subject of leadership. The material is the conclusion all hello s of a two-year study. It has been honed down to what is important and usable in the workplace. Implemented, these practices will have immense impact on our organizations. By saying the “very best” but we do not mean “the only”. There are many other excellent leadership practices t...

Article 117 : Course Outline - Develop An Innovation Management System TIM

Course Description This two day workshop provides a hands on approach to develop a customized innovation management system (IMS) unique to your organization. This is the only innovation training course based on the methodology, elements and requirements of the TIM-STD-PD-001 Innovation Management Standard and supporting guidelines. Coverage includes Culture, Leadership, Resources, Processes, Monitoring & Measuring, Improvement and the three phases of the innovation cycle, Front-End, Mi...

152 Learning Innovation : Deepening Understanding

Throughout this website we have written in various degrees of detail what are some of the most important innovation practices. No area of study seems more disjointed and freewheeling than innovation. What follows here is a quick look at some of the more important elements of innovation that we need to know to get started. Almost everything in the following series of articles has been written about somewhere on this site. The purpose of the articles that follow is simply to add a little depth ...

202 Innovation : Build An Innovation Zone

In today's retail and wholesale markets, differentiating ourselves is a major challenge. The big box stores look alike and feel alike. The same can be said for the small-time merchants. They are filled with new and innovative products; some are beautifully designed. But new products or old, they have the same problem: commoditization and squeezed margins. Commoditization refers to products being sold for what they cost rather than for what their value to their end-user is. No sooner th...

203 Innovation : Finding Our Champions & Best People

Imagine if each and every person in our business arrived at work believing they could influence the destiny of our company through their ideas and innovations. Then imagine we could do this without creating major chaos. Can we delight our customers with radical, rule breaking concepts for brand new services, cutting-edge products, redesigned strategies, and virgin business models? Does that seem like a bit much? Maybe. Maybe not: we can do a lot more than we think we can. Every company, at it...

204 Innovation : Breakthrough Ideas

Can innovation consistently lead to improved prosperity? Is there a simple path to a surge in business? Can you suddenly dominate your own little niche or category with a new product or service? Is there a reliable approach to innovation that will almost always lead to increased prosperity? Yes, yes, yes and yes! While the pace and effectiveness of innovation are changing competitive challenges as we know them, the traditional approach to innovation is often not worth the effort. The fo...

205 Innovation : Generating Game Changing Ideas With Teams

Earlier we armed you with a simple tool to identify your customers' most pressing and important needs. Such clarity about what customers will pay a premium for is the basis for developing breakthrough products and services. Now, we are going to hone in on what we do with these valuable newly-found, critical insights. The Need for Focus Big ideas come from insights that center on solving customer problems. Not everyone would agree with this; some think that the best ideas come from w...

206 Innovation -Drive Our Dreams With Strategy

Stay the Course – Reinvent Yourself! To a business owner or CEO, "Stay the Course & Reinvent Yourself" may sound like a choice between continuing on a given path or choosing another. However, the truth is that innovative firms continue being one thing while becoming something else; they bridge a paradox, a duality. Let's think of our business in terms of "Performance Engines" or “S-Curves”. Lifecycles and S-Curves An S-Curve can be thought of as a lifecycle of any part...

207 Innovation Is A Symphony, A Harmony, And A Romance

To be an effective business leader these days takes more than the usual business skills. What has become necessary is developing "soft skills". The CEO’s position now demands the skill set of a symphony orchestra conductor. That means having a deep love not only for the company but also for all its stakeholders. While no one seems to put it this way, the healthiest organizations run best when the CEOs romance their people. That deep caring is critical when balancing and harmonizing the many...

208 Innovation - Copy Cat Your Way To Success

According to Rob Adams, author of If You Build It, Will They Come, more than 65% of new products introduced by established companies, with already entrenched products, will fail; for start-up companies the failure rate is over 90%. The probabilities for success, with a new innovation, increase dramatically when a Jobs-to-Be-Done analysis is done. Ulwick & Bettencourt claim an 80% innovation success rate when that analysis uncovers what customers really want. That analysis focuses on indiv...

209 Innovation : Anticipate, Mobilize Speedily, Then Swarm

"In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed" - Ralph Waldo Emerson. Since the arrival of the Internet we have lived in an age of unexpected change amidst information overload. The speed of business is not letting us stay the same, especially in terms of our organizational structure. The whole world is shifting corporate governance from traditional command-and-control mode to “knowledge worker” power, at least in companies that want to grow their market share. In othe...

210 Innovation : Putting It All Together

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two - - and only two - - basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. -- Peter Drucker Marketing and innovation, it turns out, are closely interrelated. Understanding the market means having an intimate knowledge of the people who collectively struggle to get their work (and pleasures) done in simpler and easier ways. Innovation is not ...

300 Leadership Best Practices : Widely Admired & Spectacularly Unsuccessful

Please Note: The source material in this Leadership Practices series has been deliberately omitted in order to improve readability. If you wish to reference such, then please email us at info@pe-trick.com and ask for the scholarly paper TEN BEST PRACTICES OF LEADERSHIP. When followers are not clay in the hands of leaders, organizational pathology follows. The resulting secrecy, blame, isolation, avoidance, passivity, and feelings of helplessness will begin to reinforce each other. Some c...

301 Leadership Best Practice 1 : Root In Authentic Self

Learning to lead is a lot easier than most of us think it is, because each of us contains the capacity for leadership. Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. Becoming Our Self As adults we learn best when we take charge of our own learning, and taking charge of our own learning is taking charge of our own life. The key to understanding is learning from our own life and experience. We are fully able to express ourselves when we know what our strengths are, and what our we...

302 Leadership Best Practice 2 : Serve Heartily

The Servant Leader sees himself called first as a servant, seeking not only to treat each follower with dignity as a person, but also to serve each beneficially while building a community of participation and solidarity. His motivation is to create value for the group of which he is a member; this is the extreme opposite of a leader who seeks first his own power and wealth. Legitimate Power There is a common belief "that only those at the top of the hierarchy can create change". This st...

303 Leadership Best Practice 3 : Build Trust & Connect

Words & Hearts Trust is a "willingness to rely on another party and to take action in circumstances where such action makes one vulnerable to the other party". As trust grows so does the flow, accuracy and quantity of information between followers and leaders. In this age of the knowledge worker, information is a source of power and performance. The smooth willing flow of good information is crucial. There are seven cardinal principles of trust all leaders should respect: Trus...

304 Leadership Best Practice 4 : Align For Vital Passion

The whole point of leadership is to mobilize followers. Command-and-control thinking is at best a negotiated exchange and more often is outright manipulation. Free-spirited willingness is not generally involved. Effective leaders pull followers rather than push them. They tug at the heart. They do not need formal authority although such authority greatly increases their power and effectiveness. Our notion of what a leader is must broaden. If we cannot lead as a peer, instead of as a su...

305 Leadership Best Practice 5 : Co-Create A Dream

Emotional intelligence is necessary for leadership but not sufficient. Using emotional intelligence to gain formal or informal authority is not leadership at all. Leaders help followers dream. They don't impose their vision for that is nothing less than manipulation through power. Gaining primal authority for manipulation is relatively easy for many individuals. We need to grasp that certain people want authority for selfish purposes; it is little more than organizational panderi...

306 Leadership Best Practice 6 : Anticipate

Neoteny is a zoological term that describes curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, and energy. Neotenic leaders and followers are "first-class noticers". Their ability to tolerate uncertainty helps them be aware of how many situations are in a state of flux and change. People of ordinary ability do not wake up to change until a big change has occurred. Being comfortable with high levels of uncertainty increases our awareness of how the world around us is changing. It al...

307 Leadership Best Practice 7 : Mobilize And Act

"What we do matters.... Action is, in the end, the only thing that counts." Effective performance has three essential components: Focusing on where we can add the most value, and prioritizing tasks, will eliminate stressful overload while directing our concentration Speed and the timely use of "in-course correction" will reduce frustration and wasted effort while overcoming reluctance to act Perseverance and dogged pursuit of mission and dream along with understanding the vital...

308 Leadership Best Practice 8 : Clarify And Direct

Courage and Hope The ability to inspire hope is a fundamental difference between those who lead successfully and those who do not. Inspiring hope is what makes a crucial difference as we lead. "Hope is an inner mental force that triggers action.... Hope reassures us that things will work out, that we will win". Hope energizes as it triggers anticipation, expectation and action. It is a force that makes us feel we can make a difference. Hope embraces possibilities, that some positiv...

309 Leadership Best Practice 9 : Learn, Train, Grow

"The essence of leadership lies in the continuum of growth. An effective leader, like a teacher, must inspire, educate, and nurture - - and never leave his or her pupils in the same space where they started" Organizational Growth The most successful organizations become teaching organizations from top to bottom. Such organizations do not spontaneously emerge. Rather, leaders need to use their power appropriately to build follower behavior in which people at all levels share information an...

310 Leadership Best Practice 10 : Promote Health And Balance

Learning from Letting Go The key to personal and organizational health is in forgiving and "letting go". Yet forgiveness is incredibly hard to achieve. Unless we have empathy for our own and everyone else's fallibility, we will never be able to forget and drive forward. Nothing can be more destructive than the unforgiving harboring of grudges. Related to grudges is cynicism. Cynicism is an amazing and disturbing teacher.... I have discovered that people are cynical only about the thin...

311 Leadership : Putting It All Together 11

In Brief The inspirational dream brings about passion. The dream is developed from a collective, based on their beliefs, attitudes, and values. The dream created becomes individually owned throughout the organization. Inspiration lends itself to emotional intelligence in developing the skills of self-awareness, self-management, and empathy. An environment of trust, comfort and fairness is built. From that strength of leadership, the ensuing relationship leads to an ongoing sharing of ...

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