5 leadership lessons from Mac OS X Lion launch

Steve Jobs headed up another seemingly successful Apple product launch Wednesday, taking to the stage in Cupertino to announce a revamped MacBook Air and updated operating system. Jobs and the other Apple bigwigs not only rolled out a few drool-worthy products, they also offered a more subtle lesson in business leadership.

Fast Company pinpointed five leadership lessons doled out at the Back to the Mac event that business-minded folks can take home. (A cheaper take home than a $1499 MacBook Air, no doubt.)

• Adapt. Take note of what works with one product line and apply it to your other product lines.
• Rethink. Don’t straight up copy “what works” within your product line.
• Stand strong. Don’t follow trends blindly and hold your ground on things of value to your customers.
• Understand. Read between the lines of what you’re really selling.
• Sparkle. Add a touch of pizazz.

Full Story at FastCompany

Game Changers

by Mike Myatt at Blogging Innovation

At one time or another all great leaders experience something that is so big, so impactful, that it literally changes the landscape. It’s what I call a “Game Changer.” A game changer is that ah-ha moment that creates an extreme, disruptive advantage or improvement. What’s interesting is that the best leaders proactively focus on looking for game changers. Sure, great leaders never lose sight of their core business, they pay attention to managing risk, etc., but they spend far more energy intentionally searching for opportunity, but not just any opportunity – a game changer. In the text that follows I’ll not only provide you with a blue print for finding game changers, but I’ll also ask you to share your experiences and insights as well. I hope this post is a game changer for you…

As most of you know, I spent last week at the World Business Forum in New York. I listened to esteemed business school professors, two Nobel laureates, bestselling authors, and some of the world’s most successful CEOs. These were all people who have personally experienced game changers, and some have experienced them many times over.

While there were clearly a few moments last week that I found instructionally valuable in terms of creating a game changer (Nando Parrado), there weren’t nearly enough of them. There was far too much rehashing of old ideas spun as new. A game changer doesn’t maintain the status quo, it shatters it. It was this taste of disappointment that led me to share my personal process for finding and implementing game changers – I call it SMARTS (Simple-Meaningful-Actionable-Relational-Transformational-Scalable).

The Nine Rules of Innovation

by Braden Kelley:

Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.

Here are the nine innovation roles:

Top 10 Speakers at the World Business Forum 2010

by Mike Myatt

The video above recaps the final day of this year’s World Business Forum in New York. In yesterday’s recap of Day one, I gave a detailed breakdown of each speaker presentation, but today I thought I’d do something a bit different…Since everyone seems to like a list, I decided to rank the top ten speakers from both days. So the list that follows is my ranking of the Top 10 Speakers from World Business Forum 2010 as well as my logic behind the rankings.

1. Nando Parrado- Nando was the only speaker at the conference to receive a standing ovation, but this is not why I ranked him #1. Nando earned the top spot on the list because his presentation simply raised the bar to an entirely different level. He recounted the miracle of surviving 72 days after his plane crashed high in the Andes. After being unconscious for 3 days and being counted among the dead by other survivors, Nando awoke to find his mother, sister and a number of his rugby teammates had died. They had no food, water or winter clothing. At an elevation above 12,000 feet and with temperatures that reached -35 below zero, Nando not only survived the initial crash, but a broken skull, being buried by a subsequent avalanche, eating the flesh of the dead, and then hiking for 11 days covering 70 miles across the Andes in street clothes to get help. This was one of the longest human survival accounts in history and was later made into the book Miracle in the Andes and then into the movie Alive. As a result of Nando’s efforts 16 people were rescued after 72 days in the Andes. Nando is an exceptional human being whose philosophy can be boiled down into two of the quotes given in his presentation: “I fought so hard for life that I decided to have a life” & “life is success.” Nando’s presentation simply put things into perspective for a world sorely lacking perspective. Bravo Nando…

Top Ten Innovation and Marketing Articles

Well just thought of showcasing the top ten articles currently on the web with regards to Innovation and Marketing. This list however was compiled by Braden Kelley.

• Innovation and Porter’s Value Chain – Jeffrey Phillips
• Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2010 – Braden Kelley
• Building a Marketing Strategy for Innovation Efforts – James Pasmantier
• Rethinking Failure – Mitch Ditkoff
• Enhancing Creativity – Adult Games versus Kid Games – Stephen Shapiro
• Innovation Doesn’t Begin with Idea Generation – Jeffrey Phillips
• 50 Ways to Foster a Culture of Innovation – Mitch Ditkoff
• Problem Solving Skills Different Than Intelligence – Idris Mootee
• Does Your Culture Support Innovation? – Holly G. Green
• Future of Work – Saul Kaplan

The 7 Habits of Highly Innovative People

Its been an unending venture to find out what actually makes a person innovative. Some speak about how leaders communicate and inspire, the passion for work, the insight they have on the market etc. However, I believe that these following habits are quite common among most innovators. If you wish to be an innovator, I would simply suggest to learn yourself well and blend into your favorite environment.

Habit 1: Be Passionate. Finding your passion is not only the key to happiness, but also the key to business success. As Steve Jobs once said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” (Be Proactive)

Habit 2: Do Something. You don’t always know where it’s going to lead, but it’s always better to do something than to suffer analysis paralysis. Legendary oil-man and entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens has a way of quickly sizing up a situation, coming up with a plan, and acting. There’s no sitting around or endless analysis and debate. It seems to have worked for him. (Begin with the End in Mind)

Habit 3: Put First Things First, Second, and Third. Covey says prioritize, but I’ll take it one step further. Whoever said, “don’t sweat the small stuff,” was right, and I’ll add, “don’t do or even think about the small stuff.” Every successful innovative person I know jumps on hot opportunities and critical issues like they’re the only things that matter on god’s green Earth. (Put First Things First)

Ideas and Intellectual Property – The New Product?

by Jeffrey Phillips

As my final sally into the intellectual capital topics introduced by Mary Adams in her book Intangible Capital I wanted to respond to one other question that Mary posed. She asked:

“What’s the relationship between innovation and intangible capital?

My answer to that is to paraphrase Keynes by saying we’re all innovators in the long run.

In today’s economy every business is an idea business. Think about it carefully. Is there a business you can think of that isn’t constantly trying to improve its operations, cut costs, increase market share? From the most automated manufacturer to the firms that make a living spitting out ideas for other firms, every firm is in the idea business. It’s simply a matter of how the ideas are used. In many firms that would scoff at the concept that they are idea businesses, the focus of idea generation is on improving productivity and efficiency. Yes, firms that use concepts like Lean and Six Sigma are generating and applying new ideas – they may not consider themselves “innovative”, but the ideas they generate are meant to improve the bottom line or the top line. Firms that have specific innovation functions are clearly generating ideas to differentiate, disrupt other markets or create organic growth. Firms that have deep R&D skills are creating ideas to add depth to intellectual property, patents and trade secrets, which adds value to the firm. Service industries that generate ideas to radically improve customer experience are generating ideas to differentiate in a completely different space, but those ideas are no less important or valuable.

The Power of Ignorance

If desperation is the mother of innovation, then ignorance might be its father. In the early stages of a company, being protected from external influences can be a powerful stimulant for creativity and innovation. Why? For the same reason that we often see some of the most creative and entrepreneurial insights coming from younger people. Wisdom and experience help to grow and sustain a company, but generating novel ideas requires a certain amount of naïveté. In the context of entrepreneurship and idea generation, ignorance equals open-mindedness. An empty mind is an open one — it is empty of bias, empty of past experience, and empty of external critique.

Being unencumbered by external opinions allows two critical entrepreneurial traits to thrive: creativity and conviction. The former is most important during the early think-big stages of a company, and the latter is vital to mobilizing the team to execute with excellence.