BUILD YOUR CHANGE MUSCLE

Aidan McCullen recommended, “Built to Innovate: Essential Practices to Wire Innovation into Your Company’s DNA”. I can see why. We live in a time when change is the rule, not the exception, and innovation is the only way out. However, every organisation needs to operate two different engines simultaneously: an execution engine and an innovating engine. You need both.

The execution engine

The execution engine is about doing your current work as skilfully, efficiently, and flawlessly as possible. The mindset of the execution engine is sceptical, logical, demanding, and rigorous. All the many financial metrics used to define business success — return on investment (ROI), return on equity (ROE), earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), the Berry ratio, and more — may be brought into play.

The innovating engine

Managing the innovating engine is quite a different matter. It’s about looking for new ideas — imagining new products or services, designing new work methods or processes, experimenting with new technologies, learning about new markets, or investigating customer (and non-customer) needs and desires that you’ve never previously tried to address.

Ideas

Ideas and possibilities floated by the innovating engine are — at least temporarily — embraced without concern about…