By Jenny Fernandez
As the market continues to change with increasing speed, leaders are finding it more important than ... [+]
“Keeping your eye on the future is essential for making the most of today”
— New York Times Best Seller Author Michael Hyatt.
CEOs and Founders of emerging growth startups could benefit from the lessons learned from some of the top companies in the world; especially the ones that didn’t make it.
In a world of disruption, many of these companies have been displaced or taken over by the lack of growth and innovative thinking. Research shows that since 2000, over 50% of Fortune 500 companies have either “gone bankrupt, been acquired, or ceased to exist as a result of digital disruption.” This means that they were too slow to adapt to the evolving market conditions, including new trends and advances in technology. These companies were no longer relevant as they failed to innovate to meet changing customer needs in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Research also states that startups face a similar threat—11 out of 12 startups fail. For them, failing to innovate proved crippling yet preventable. Companies need innovation to drive growth and thrive. In today’s climate of disruption, CEOs that are innovative, vision-driven, and focused on growing their company avoid failure and achieve success. Here are three innovative strategies to thrive in an evolving, competitive, and fast-moving market.
Companies need innovation to drive growth and thrive. In today’s climate of disruption, CEOs that are innovative, vision-driven, and focused on growing their company avoid failure and achieve success.
Foster a Curious Mindset
Curiosity is defined as a strong desire to learn, which is essential for innovation. As a CEO/Founder, being curious helps you be more open, visionary, and influential as you are more willing to learn, adapt, and change perspective. Curiosity is an overlooked core competency that is essential for success. It is a way of thinking that opens you to possibilities. It is also a learned mindset, so actively instilling curiosity in yourself is the first step.
Curiosity unlocks creativity and imagination and allows you to openly explore untethered solutions without the risk of judgment or failure. This means you are unconstrained by conventional thoughts and are free to create something new and bespoke.
Great CEOs are unrestricted in their imagination. They don’t see the barriers that others see. CEOs/Founders of innovative Unicorns like Amazon, Alibaba, and Stripe have prioritized curiosity and innovation in their values and guiding principles. Optimizing for this mindset has helped these CEOs better understand current and future customer needs, identify new revenue streams and empower their teams to be more dynamic and solution-oriented.
How to do it:
- Boost your curiosity quotient by making innovative thinking a daily habit. Ask questions, and don’t believe you have all the answers or need to quickly decide on every issue facing your organization. Thus, keeping your ego in check and always being customer centric will make you more curious. In the book, Questions Are The Answer, innovation expert Hal Gregerson writes that many leaders are quick to solve a problem, only to realize later that the real solution lies in thinking differently and reframing the question.
- Practice “Yes, And.” This powerful improv tool has great leadership applications as it fosters contribution and the building of ideas. This means leading by example. Research states that building organizational curiosity as part of the company values increases engagement and collaboration, thus improving business performance. For example, from a business perspective, this strategy is of great value when cooperation can give you a competitive advantage like it did for “Apple and Google’s decision to cooperate in creating contact-tracing technology for Covid-19.” This approach helped them create new ‘interoperability protocols’ standards and protocols for user location data across platforms. Or when “Ford invited Volkswagen to join its investment in Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle startup” helping them share the investment cost on a new technology that would unlock a larger market they could later compete on.
Boost your curiosity quotient by making innovative thinking a daily habit. Ask questions, and don’t believe you have all the answers or need to quickly decide on every issue facing your organization.
Boosting your curiosity quotient—a practice of learning about the world in new and innovative ... [+]
Create a Culture of Curiosity and Creativity.
Leaders must integrate creativity and innovation as part of the organization's DNA. A curious team makes a more effective team. As a CEO/Founder, you must create the conditions and psychological safety for innovative thinking within your team. You set the tone for the desired employee behavior and foster a culture that allows those around you to create, contribute and collaborate. You also set the agenda, create the platform for sharing, and tap colleagues in all ranks to contribute. By making creativity, curiosity, and an appetite for knowledge part of your organization’s culture, you will help the team grow and evolve as the business, consumer, and market conditions change.
How to do it:
- Reframe failure. Being comfortable with not knowing and seeing failure as a learning opportunity is key. Take a lesson from Amazon's “It is always Day 1” mindset which is about being constantly curious, nimble, and experimental,” just like when they were a startup 25 years ago. This mental model allows Amazon employees to be open to experimenting, learning from failures and optimizing or pivoting to achieve success.
- Hire for Curiosity. CEOs from the Top 100 Companies have identified “culture fit,” “enthusiasm,” and “curiosity” as the top skills they look for in candidates in addition to any required technical skills needed to do the job. Thus, probe for curiosity in your interview process with questions like:
○ “What interests you the most about this position?”
○ “How do you learn new things?”
○ “What books or articles have you read lately?”
○ “How do you strive for self-improvement?”
○ “What organizations do you think are innovative?”
By making creativity, curiosity, and an appetite for knowledge part of your organization’s culture, you will help the team grow and evolve as the business, consumer, and market conditions change.
Invest in Innovation to be Future-Proof.
Leaders need to look at what the business may need in the future and address the readiness gap by building the processes and capabilities to make them resilient in times of disruption. Research states that close to 50% of U.S. annual GDP growth is driven by innovation at the enterprise level. So, investing in innovation is placing a bet on the future. It requires leaders to embrace a spirit of experimentation as a mechanism to get feedback and see what works. Thus, making innovation an integral part of your strategic goals and long-term business strategy.
How to do it:
- Reallocate existing resources to focus on creativity and innovation. Most people are so strapped for time that they can only focus on the most urgent tasks, barely keeping up with their busy calendars, overflowing inboxes, and back-to-back meetings. Yet, we know how essential it is to prepare for the future and what’s next. We can learn from Google’s “20% time” innovation-focus on autonomous ways of working. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote in their IPO letter, “We encourage our employees to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google.” They attribute this policy for creating successful innovations like Google News (2002), AdSense (2003), and Gmail (2004).
- Elevate organizational capabilities. To build resilience and adaptability from the ground up, you must invest in your team’s capabilities. This will empower them to deliver on your strategic goals. Consider hiring an executive coach for yourself and your senior leaders. This partnership will help all of you break from old habits and norms and reframe your thinking to address new challenges. Add new external strategic collaborators as an extension of your teams to keep a pulse on future trends and build a competitive advantage.
One of the strongest strategies for future-proofing as a leader is allocating resources to the ... [+]
Visionary entrepreneurs must create an environment that fosters and rewards curiosity, creativity, and collaboration. These factors are critical to preparing yourself, your senior leadership team, and the organization to address the uncertainty ahead. To prepare themselves for future disruptions, CEO/Founders must instill innovative habits in themselves and their teams to keep being relevant, agile, and in sync with evolving customer needs. “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity - not a threat,” Steve Jobs.
Jenny Fernandez, MBA, is an Executive Coach, CMO - Ex-Kraft/Mondelez, and Adjunct Professor at Columbia GSB. Her mission is to help successful leaders & entrepreneurs drive exponential growth by unlocking strategic resilience, collaboration, and innovative thinking.
