Recommended Readings for Creative Leaders for Fall 2014

Thus far in 2014, we have seen at least two additions to the short bookshelf of essential readings for creative leaders: Pixar CEO Ed Catmull’s account (with Amy Wallace) of building and sustaining a successful creative culture, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration; and Harvard Business School Professor Linda A. Hill’s masterful guide to leading successful innovation across organizations, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (written with Greg Brandeau, Kent Lineback, and Emily Truelove). Other recent highlights included Connected by Design: Seven Principles for Business Transformation through Functional Integration, the outstanding work about new ways to create value through brand ecosystems, by Barry Wacksman and Chris Stutzman of the legendary creative agency, R/GA; Stanford professors Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao’s major study of how to build up businesses successfully, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less; and Arianna Huffington’s manifesto for re-defining well-being, work and success, revisionist study of talent and creativity, Thrive: The Third Metric and Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-being, Wisdom, and Wonder.

The fall book season is now upon us and promises further new and relevant titles. These will include analyses of marketing, China, and Google, a handful of titles on innovation, ranging from practical implementation guides to a longer history, and, perhaps most far-reaching, reflections on the changes wrought by digital technologies to individuals and society. All contain insights valuable to the work and lives of creative leaders.

1) Ulrich Boser, The Leap: The Science of Trust and Why It Matters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/New Harvest, September 16)

Traveling from rural Rwanda to corporate America, and from paying taxes to using technology, Boser argues that individuals are hard-wired for trust and trustworthiness and that emphasizing and restoring trust can benefit us as humans as well as our institutions and communities.

2) Richard Branson, The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership (Penguin/Portfolio, September 9)

The iconic CEO and entrepreneur, already author of a best-selling autobiography and books on business, here describes his key leadership principles like good listening, keeping things simple, remaining iconoclastic, motivating people, and having fun along the way.

3) Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (Norton, September 29)

Carr, the consistently trenchant analyst of technological change who wrote The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, here offers a thoughtful and sometimes disturbing account, grounded in science and poetry alike, of the ways that our increasing reliance on technology is affecting our happiness and re-shaping our humanity.

4) Lawrence A. Cunningham, Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values (Columbia Business School Publishing, October 21)

An extraordinary portrait of the fifty direct subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway, investment guru Warren Buffett’s $300 billion conglomerate, told through the companies’ distinct stories and the vital values like integrity, autonomy, entrepreneurship and a sense of permanence that they, and Buffett, share.

5) Tom Doctoroff, Twitter Is Not a Strategy: Remastering the Art of Brand Marketing (Palgrave MacMillan, November 11)

The Asia CEO of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, Doctoroff uses characteristic wit and decades of experience to take on the twin hypes of digital media and the China market and to offer insightful principles for successful customer engagement and integrated brand marketing.

6) Stewart D. Friedman, Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life (Harvard Business Review Press, October 7)

Wharton professor Friedman, building on his excellent study, Total Leadership, uses examples ranging from Sheryl Sandberg to Bruce Springsteen to move from familiar calls to balance competing work and life commitments toward taking steps, instead, to integrate our passions and values across the domains of work, home, community, and the private self.

7) Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer, The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Startup into Your Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, September 9)

How can business leaders better manage the uncertainty intrinsic to prototyping and experimentation? Picking up from Dyer’s bestselling guide to generating ideas, The Innovator’s DNA (written with Hal Gregersen and Clay Christensen), this new volume focuses on proven techniques that allow start-ups and established firms to commercialize ideas successfully.

8) Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Simon & Schuster, October 7)

Isaacson, the biographer of Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, and most recently, Steve Jobs, has penned a sweeping history of digital technologies, the computer and internet, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, with Lord Byron’s daughter, and tracing the innovative thinking, creative leadership and energetic collaboration to the present day.  

9) Langdon Morris, Moses Ma and Po Chi Wu, Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity Hardcover (Wiley, September 22)

Two leading innovation thinkers and consultants (Morris and Ma) and an engineering professor (Wu) have written an excellent (and overdue) guide to how agile techniques, like process acceleration, risk management, and fuller team engagement, have fostered successful innovation for leading businesses and can be put into practice elsewhere.

10) Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Wiley, October 20)

Using the same engaging visual approach as their groundbreaking Business Model Generation, which pioneered the business model canvas, Osterwalder et al focus on the most important of the canvas’ building blocks, the value proposition, and enable readers to work through seven key principles for better designing what matters to customers. 

11) Shaun Rein, The End of Copycat China: The Rise of Creativity, Innovation and Individualism in China (Wiley, October 20)

A leading consultant and commentator on the Chinese society and economy, and the author of The End of Cheap China, Rein analyzes current large-scale shifts in China from investment toward consumption, and from copying to innovation, that require a strategic re-thinking by investors and creative leaders doing (or wanting to do) business there.

12) Paul Roberts, The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification (Bloomsbury, September 2)

A troubling, cross-disciplinary account of how individual pursuits of consumption, pleasure, and immediate rewards, advanced by new technologies and compromised ethics, have evolved in a new and pervasive ‘culture of narcissism’ — that journalist Roberts nevertheless closes on a hopeful note of how we can pull back and change.

13) Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt, How Google Works (Grand Central/Business Plus, September 23).

Google’s former SVP of Products and ex-CEO reveal how the global tech company has grown by doing things differently, like hiring multitalented ‘smart creatives’ and leading with the recognition that ‘consensus requires dissension,’ in order to continually create new products and serve consumers in a fast-changing environment.

Review of 'Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation,' by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove & Kent Lineback (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014)

The Introduction to Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation calls for a different kind of leader who creates organizations both willing and able to innovate.  From that innocuous opening, this new study quickly moves to engage the challenges and complexities confronting those wanting to enable innovation.  Much of the complexity is captured in six paradoxes – from “support” and “confrontation” to “bottom up” and “top down” – that create ongoing tension.  These are then summarized in a “fundamental paradox” between “unleashing” and “harnessing” the talents in an organization.  Through the dozen case studies that follow, these paradoxes demonstrate not only the potential of different kinds of leaders but the value of different kinds of thinking about leadership in fostering and driving innovation.

In less capable hands, such a reliance on paradoxes or tensions in describing leadership might reflect indecisive or incomplete analysis.  For Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback, it instead conveys with evidence and assurance the complicated realities of new organizational forms and behaviors.  In fact, despite its presentation of a series of individual leaders, the book establishes a category of its own that yokes together the best of conventional analyses of leadership and innovation.  The result is an invaluable guide to enabling collaboration and collective behavior at a time when innovation and creative problem-solving are increasingly the norm.

The first major section of Collective Genius addresses how leaders create a willingness to do the hard work of innovation.  There are three major challenges here:

• Purpose: Why we exist
• Shared Values: What we agree is important
• Rules of Engagement: How we interact with each other and think about problems

Defining these elements helps to create a context in which others can innovate.  Looking at Volkswagen and Pentagram, the design agency, the authors offer practical instances of encouraging risk-taking, trying new ideas, and building solutions together to form a greater sense of community.

The second major section takes on how leaders can create the ability to do the hard work of innovation.  It is also defined in three aspects: 

• Creative Abrasion: The ability to generate ideas through discourse and debate
• Creative Agility: The ability to test and experiment through quick pursuit, reflection and adjustment
• Creative Resolution: The ability to make integrative decisions that combine disparate or even opposing ideas

Together, these organizational skills correspond to the major elements of the innovation process – collaboration, decision-based learning, and integrative decision-making.  Tracking efforts at Pixar, eBay in Germany, and Google, the authors offer examples of how practically these skills can be operationalized and also integrated with each other.  

Amidst all the discussion of innovation processes and organizational behavior, how exactly do leaders fit here?  They may be visionaries – but don’t have to be.  Even if they are, they don’t hold forth and inspire from the mountaintop.  Instead, the role of the leader is re-cast again and again in these pages.  Vineet Nayer, of HCL, is a “social architect”; Larry Smarr of Calit2, “a dot-connector extraordinaire”; and managers at Google, according to then CEO Eric Schmidt, “aggregators of viewpoints, not dictators of decisions.”  What is consistent in Collective Genius is that traditional formal authority gives way to nimble orchestration, informal facilitation, and contributions to community-building.

The real hero for Hill and her co-authors, as a result, is less the individual than the innovation eco-system.  Successful leaders, they conclude, work to create innovation environments “in which the unique slices of genius in their organization are rendered into a single work of collective genius.” Moreover, and this is ultimately the book's most illuminating lesson, that collective genius not only yields more sustainable innovation but transforms leadership itself. 

Saying 'Innovation' or 'Creativity' Is Not Enough

“What’s the opposite of innovation?,” the joke begins.  A tart punchline quickly follows: “Innovation consultants.”   

Since I teach, coach and sometimes consult on innovation and creative leadership, that cynical joke gives me pause.  Consultants of all kinds are easy marks, of course, whether they are from well-known global firms or one-person shops.  But it is innovation, as an idea and, increasingly, the basis of a cottage industry for consulting, advising, coaching and even counseling, that is the real target here.

Isn’t innovation good, though?, we ask.  Doesn’t thinking, designing, building and leading for innovation enable firms of all kinds to create and capture value?  Doesn’t imaginative collaboration, teaming, and organizing lead to breakthroughs that can transform businesses, industries and even markets?  Doesn’t innovation ultimately benefit individuals by encouraging and nurturing self-awareness, empathy, courage, and growth – human values that help contribute to personal fulfillment?

All true.  Yet that very sweep and sprawl of meanings is part of the problem.  Innovation is everywhere, from social and political agendas and corporate mission and vision statements to strategic positioning and brand marketing priorities to team charters and individual performance goals.  Likewise, creativity, often in adjectival form, has become a necessary qualifier for nearly all aspects of management and operations: leadership, strategy, talent management, organizational design, customer or client relationships, collaboration, and teamwork.  Even creative accounting has become a worthy aspiration (just not “too” creative…).

The expanded usage, to be sure, reflects some far-reaching and very real economic and historical shifts that have recently foregrounded aspects of creativity and innovation for individuals, firms and larger economies.  I myself often assert that “creativity is the new normal” to underscore the unprecedented opportunities, even necessities, facing businesses in a world where technology is transforming old and new industries alike.  My question here is whether the words themselves, asked to say so much in their varied and continual usage, increasingly end up saying little or nothing at all. 

There is no shortage of models, frameworks and typologies attempting to break out and define more precise and different meanings.  Classic distinctions of “innovation,” many well-drawn by some of our most astute observers and analysts of business and management, tend to delve deeply into specific areas.  We might think here of Clayton Christensen on disruptive innovation, Gary Hamel on management innovation, and Vijay Govindarajan on reverse innovation.  And so many other qualifiers of the word have become commonplace: incremental, radical, architectural, modular, technological, knowledge, product, process and so on.  Much more typically, though, both “innovation” and “creativity” are used generically by firms themselves, consultancies, the popular and business press, the blogosphere, and even some academic research to burnish a diverse but finally vague range of insights, tools and management practices.

Having an excess of overlapping and alternative tools and models is fine, of course, for leaders on the ground who use them to gain greater insights about, or to address directly, specific situations.  That assumes, however, a thorough familiarity with these different innovative approaches and how (or, more fundamentally, if) to apply them usefully to those specific situations.  Here we might return to the question of innovation consultants.  What is the precise form of expertise they offer?  Launching start-ups based on original ideas, developing new products or services for established firms, redesigning work processes, nurturing creative people or cultures, re-drawing business models?  Maybe all of those.  Or maybe none.  The challenge is finding the right fit of specific capabilities and experience from the growing constellation of offerings made using the same terms.

How did our usage of “innovation” and “creativity” spiral out of control?  From recent history, we might start looking in the 1980s-1990s.  The redefinition of creative work, industries and economies, began then in the UK and was furthered elsewhere by analysts like Richard Florida, who repositioned creativity as a driving force in the (re-)development of cities, societies and economies.  More generally at the same time, though hearkening back to the early 20^th century writings of Joseph Schumpeter, a doctrine of “innovation economics” emerged in the work of a diverse group of theorists and analysts to argue that knowledge, innovation and entrepreneurship are not outliers but essential to economic growth and productivity. 

Yet probably nothing has had as great an impact as the profound developments that have occurred in Silicon Valley (and the larger technology economy to which it has been central).  Combining a mythology of individual ingenuity, a culture of business entrepreneurship, and a demonstrated potential for world-changing invention, Silicon Valley has become a vital source for popular and corporate imaginings of creativity and innovation.  Even as the technologies produced there have transformed lives, societies and economies around the world, the thinking and language of openness, risk-taking, start-ups, and innovation has spread as far.

Amidst the concern that tech firms are in the midst of another financial bubble, with unjustifiably high market valuations potentially ready to burst, I see another Silicon Valley bubble in play.  It involves the inflation of certain ways of thinking and talking about innovation that originated in and around tech firms.  This language bubble, or what we might otherwise see as an internally-referencing echo chamber, grows through a continuing series of blogposts, websites, magazine articles, and books that largely re-package the same practices, policies and behaviors as being conducive to innovation and creativity.

What would Google do?, we ask.  A loose grouping of ideas and beliefs and leading practices have come increasingly to represent current thinking about how all organizations, regardless of industry or market, can best cultivate innovative and creative work.  Much of this is enormously positive, both fulfilling for people and productive for organizations.  In the process, the larger popular and practical discourse around Silicon Valley-style innovation has grown and grown.  One consequence is what Bill O’Connor, of Autodesk, calls “innovation pornography,” in which too many people become voyeurs, rapturously watching others innovate without doing so themselves.  Another is the myth that creativity and original thinking can solve any problem or develop an idea the world will eventually embrace. 

While I do believe fully in that problem-solving and even society-transforming potential, my point is that the generic superpower of creativity or innovation will not be the force to do so.  Rather, it is by understanding how creativity and innovation, even with all their inherent messiness, disorder, and indirectness, need specific situations and contexts in order to flourish and effect meaningful change.  Innovation and creativity, writ large and generic, are not strategic silver bullets.

A challenge I regularly pose to executives is to ask themselves “the follow-up question” about key words they use to characterize themselves or their firms.  So once they’ve identified their core values, for example, they need to probe more deeply what those values mean to them and the situations in which they’re working.  Trust, growth, inspiration, and purpose are all admirable values.  Yet they can mean very different things to different people and in different leadership situations.  What do those words mean to you, I ask, and why are they so important?  Innovation and creativity, I contend, warrant the same depth of reflection and elaboration.

To begin, you might ask yourself such questions as:

·      What are your benchmarks or examples when you speak of innovation? How relevant are they to your existing situation – and your people, culture, industry, market(s), and customers?  Even the most inspiring general cases of innovation – think of Edison’s light bulb, the Manhattan Project, or the pirates at Apple who developed the Macintosh – may have no relevance to the innovation that’s right for you, now.  Choose your examples, the stars that guide you, wisely and appropriately.

·      Going further, which examples of successful innovation and creative work outside of Silicon Valley (especially the usual suspects like Apple, Google, and Facebook) do you reference and seek to emulate?  While there’s much to admire, learn and adopt from the tech firms that have over the last two decades been so successful, their policies and practices may not be directly helpful to firms of various sizes across industries and at different stages of growth.  Instructive examples are everywhere.  To wit, I recently worked with the leader of a tech start-up whose breakthrough thinking emerged, counter-intuitively, from the practices of a century-old manufacturing firm.

·      And if you’re in an established firm, how many of your benchmarks come from start-ups?  Yes, you can and should likewise learn and draw from the approaches and actions of entrepreneurial start-ups, and elements of models like Eric Ries’ Lean Start-Up, but only if they’re applicable to and align with your own specific goals.

·      Is your entire organization, from people and performance metrics to strategic goals and resource allocation, guided by the same fuller understanding of innovation – that is, what you’re pursuing together, how, and why?  Managing the language of innovation requires both thoughtful consideration and development across organizations and ongoing effective communication.  The only leadership work harder than creating a collective vision for organizational innovation is sustaining the shared understanding and motivation that will enable its successful execution. 

·      Once you’ve developed your own fuller understanding of what you mean when you say innovation, ask if this is the innovation you and your team unit or firm really need.  All leaders need to forge the future and all organizations need to change.  The question is how best to do so.  Aligning specific kinds of innovation with individual organizational needs, capabilities and situations requires careful effort but is crucial.

This isn’t just an academic exercise.  Thoughtful leaders have long recognized the value of auditing their current innovation or creativity activities, needs and capabilities.  As time has passed and both words have been used more and more, it also seems increasingly useful to conduct an innovation and creativity language audit.  What do you mean when you say that innovation is a core value or a strategic priority?  What does specifying creative talent development mean for the shape and orientation of a HR processes or organizational learning?  More generally, how does innovation or creativity practically differentiate decisions, behaviors and results?

More than five decades ago, Theodore Levitt wrote “Creativity Is Not Enough,” one of the most famous articles in the history of marketing management.  Today, the words of his title arguably resonate in distinct ways.  The ubiquity of “innovation” and “creativity” in the language of business and management is threatening to empty them of meaning.  Increasingly, neither is sufficient to convey the vision, inspiration, newness, value, and strategy that drive a given leader, unit or firm.  

How do we change that?  One use at a time.  By doing the hard work of understanding and clarifying the newness, utility, value and change that we really envision and seek in specific situations.  Each of us needs to help take back the power of the words.  Next time you say or write “innovation” or “creativity,” pause.  How would you qualify those key words?  Or how else, beyond using placeholders, would you make your point?   Most simply, what do you really mean when you say and act on “innovation” or creativity” – and are you making that important meaning clear to others?

A Frequent Flyer's Guide to Innovation

I should open by being making clear that this post is not about imaginative ways to secure upgrades or avoid baggage or other fees….  It is, rather, about a range of ideas related to innovation and creativity experienced during a busy recent stretch of flying. Travel, of course, is generally marked by the kinds of situations often embraced by leaders wanting to foster greater creative production or excellence: engagement with unfamiliar situations and people, regular opportunities to make fresh choices and connections, a willingness to explore and uncertainty and the unknown.  During several flights since last month, though, I had various experiences explicitly about innovation, creativity and even leadership that prompted further reflection.

1. Keep Climbing

A current TV commercial for Delta Airlines shown on-board flights opens with black-and-white images of historical aviators and a voiceover declaring the need to celebrate these pioneers not by ‘looking behind’ but, like them, ‘looking beyond.’  This ‘Aviation Leaders’ entry in the ‘Keep Climbing’ campaign was created by award-winning agency Weiden + Kennedy.  Its presentation of the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart and first astronauts to walk on the moon is moving and held up as prologue to the continuing and forward-looking innovations of Delta.   Interestingly, as the comments on iSpot make clear, the commercial has been viewed alternately as inspiring but also as offensive to some, who interpret the treatment of these heroes as disrespectful (http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7IKp/delta-airlines-aviation-leaders).

2. Sky Magazine

The traditional communications outlet, creative and otherwise, for airlines is the in-flight magazine.  Delta’s paper offering, Sky, like most of its competitors, is now also available online: http://deltaskymag.delta.com/.  The September 2013 issue is conspicuously focused on creativity and brands.  The covergirl is Heidi Klum and the story of her current projects reveals an obvious focus on (personal) brand communications.  Other content extends this emphasis, for example, an article on ‘channeling American style to Asian markets’ with profiles of brands like Red Wing Shoes and Pendleton clothing.

Several of Sky’s regular features speak to the novelty and encounters with the unfamiliar that can define travel.  The ‘Wheels Up’ section offers a blurb about a cave bar in Croatia and in ‘Creative Commons’ showcases the original graphic design work of Austrian Albert Exergian and Milan’s ‘Couture Culture.’  The ‘1 City/5 Ways’ section, this month about Hong Kong, reminded me of Edward de Bono’s famous six hats approach to creative ideation by looking at the city through the eyes, respectively, of culture vultures, hipsters, people with kids, foodies, and jetsetters.

As it happens, the same issue even has an ‘In-depth Executive Education’ section on ‘The Enlightened Leader’ that uses some of the authentic leadership ideas of Bill George, author of True North, to address the need for effective leaders to identify and use their own values to guide them.  Interestingly, a box in the article featured an interview with Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School faculty member who leads the module there on marketing creative industries.  In Sky, she discusses Lady Gaga, whose case is featured in Elberse’s forthcoming book, Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking and the Business of Entertainment (MacMillan; http://www.amazon.com/Blockbusters-Hit-making-Risk-taking-Business-Entertainment/dp/0805094334).

3. Fashion’s Lessons

Besides movies, TV shows, games and the moving map tracking flight progress, TED Talks are now available as part of Delta’s in-flight entertainment.  Obviously many of these talks, both from TEDGlobal and TEDx local events, address innovative behaviors and ideas.  So it is unsurprising that among Delta’s selections are several that directly address the challenges and opportunities of creativity and creative leadership.  One example is the provocative Johanna Blakley, whose ‘Lessons from Fashion’s Free Culture’ from 2010 explores the opportunities of an open creative process and culture: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Specifically, Blakley uses fashion as a basis for contrasting both the originality and revenues of copyright protected and non-copyright protected industries – and ultimately advocating greater creative collaboration and sharing.

4. Daily Visual Inspiration

A new entertainment offering aboard Delta are brief videos from coolhunting.com, the website that is ‘synonymous with inspiration’ in all things creative: http://www.coolhunting.com/video/ .  I already receive Cool Hunting Daily updates and have enjoyed and learned from the many online profiles.  Like TED talks, a selection of the videos are now available on Delta flights.  Among the half-dozen viewable on a recent transcontinental flight were 4-7 minute films of such creatives as decoupage plate designer John Derian, tintype portrait studio Photobooth, custom ski-maker Zai, and Roy Denim’s handmade jeans.  I particularly liked the story of Lisadore, the passionate maker of one-of-a-kind Comme il Faut tango shoes in Buenos Aires.  While delivering something of the promised ‘insider look at their inspiration and process,’ the segments seem more generally to present matter-of-fact summaries of the origins and processes of these artists, designers and true originals.

5. Technology Update

On September 30, Delta announced that they were equipping 11,000 pilots with Microsoft Surface 2 tablets.  The move would replace the paper-based flight kits containing navigational charts and reference materials and carried by the crew and to take a major step toward the goal of a paperless cockpit by the end of 2014.  Trumpeting both the promised increase in efficiency and the environmental benefits of the move, their partners at Microsoft spoke directly about Delta’s ‘absolute commitment to bringing the best in technology innovation into flight operations’ (http://news.delta.com/index.php?s=43&item=2118).  A special ‘Keep Climbing’ segment was created to showcase the upgrade.

So much to consider and be inspired by.  Yet I found myself asking what are passengers to do with all this information and inspiration while at 30,000 feet.  Or to extend that beyond the flight itself, what passengers do once they land and carry on with the rest of their everyday lives.  Put more pointedly, can the insights of the TED talks or Cool Hunting vignettes or even ‘In-depth Executive Education’ offerings be taken off the plane and somehow put into practice on the ground?  Or are they minor and occasionally edifying amusements merely meant to pass time in the stratosphere, little more than an entertaining variation on the experience of a doctor’s office waiting room?

That may be a general issue for anything one does when flying.  However, with so much attention given over to creativity and innovation today, the prevalence of on-board content related to the topics I experienced begs further questioning.  In fact, stepping back from particular flights, and tales of creative daring, we might ask how to avoid merely being along for the ride of others’ creative or innovative work.  Recall the viewers of ‘Aviation Leaders’ offended by what they took to be a lack of respect for early pioneers of flying.  Those commentators raise an essential question: What do we do with our innovation heroes?  Do they stand on their own, largely set apart from our own lives and the present by their historical achievements, or do we actively use their example as motivation for our own original attempts to break free of the past?

This is hardly an either-or question.  We can venerate creative heroes from the past or faraway while also striving to stand on their giant shoulders and climb still higher in the future.  Too often, though, the tendency to romanticize their accomplishments, to dwell in every detail of their journeys, can become an end in itself.  Our challenge accordingly becomes to internalize the inspiration they provide us and to use it to inform and drive forward our own innovative work.  Or as I asked myself at the end of a recent long flight, How do we step away from being passengers on the innovation journeys of others and become better innovators or creative leaders ourselves?

More on Nurturing Innovation and Celebrating Piracy: Will the Chinese Steve Jobs be a Pirate?

If the challenge of making sense of (and advancing) innovation I raised in my last post is evident anywhere today, it is in China.  Christopher Beam's current column in Slate, "The Chinese Steve Jobs is Probably a Pirate" deftly probes which types of innovation we celebrate, which we condemn, and the murkiness of trying to distinguish them.

In the case of China, an important layer is obviously nationalistic: while we lionize our own pirates (of Silicon Valley, for instance), we readily demonize others, especially when they may seem to play in an economic system with different rules.  Yet Beam's piece is particularly useful for its reference to venerated American innovations, from Thomas Edison's phonograph to Hollywood movies, that were copied or at least adapted, updated, and improved for the mass market.  The Chinese, by this argument, have learned well the priority of implementation over invention long employed with great success by American innovators.

Put differently, the Chinese have recognized the potential value of being a second- or late-mover and tweaking existing products to exploit opportunities in the current market rather than seeking merely to invent entirely new products or markets.  As many commentators, notably including Malcolm Gladwell, noted following Steve Jobs' passing last fall, it was just this kind of re-thinking, packaging and marketing of others' inventions at which the Apple co-founder was a virtuoso.  Not unrelatedly, the other feature of successful Chinese innovation has been the use of the country's massive labor force to manufacture products cheaply.  Again, citing only the example of Foxconn as a crucial link in Apple's (and other "Western" corporations') supply chains, we can observe how blurred and uneasy are any boundaries we may want to draw between pioneering innovation and piracy.

How Innovative Leaders Lead Innovative Organizations

The current issue of Forbes features a ranking of the world's most innovative companies (http://www.forbes.com/sites/innovatorsdna/2012/09/05/how-innovative-leaders-maintain-their-edge/ ). The list itself is instructive and inspiring and refreshingly international.

At least as important, though, are the issue's introductory comments, which make clear that a crucial commonality among the innovative companies is the presence in them of innovative leaders.  That may seem at first unsurprising or even obvious: of course organizations are oriented or defined by their leadership.  But Forbes gets more specific and identifies several key traits and tendencies that leaders use to help their organizations build and sustain an innovation premium.  These include the "3P's": that is, the capability of effective leaders to continually leverage people, processes, and philosophy.

The introduction goes on to reference a favorite study of mine that has quickly become a standard in analyzing and discussing innovative leadership: Dyer, Gregerson, and Christensen's The Innovator's DNA from 2011 (http://innovatorsdna.com/).  The five "discovery skills" outlined in the book are associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting and they reveal both individually and collectively how innovative leaders successfully differentiate themselves and their organizations.  Many of the companies on the Forbes list, from Infosys to Estee Lauder to Amazon, feature innovative leaders who practice some if not all of these skills.  (Dyer and Gregerson collaborated with Forbes on the list.)

Leadership guidelines like the 3Ps or the five discovery skills are not sufficient in themselves, of course.  Their significance comes from being drawn from research and the successful examples of literally thousands of leaders and organizations.  But the true value of these insights about innovative leadership is to be found in how other and especially emergent leaders embrace the potential of the practices, reflect on and analyze their relevance to other organizations, and finally implement them in creative and effective ways.

Challenge for the New Year: Innovate Management, Organizational Design, not just Products, Services or Teams

I'm a great fan of Gary Hamel's work on management innovation. Through his research and writings, especially at Hack 2.0: The Management Innovation eXchange, he goes beyond much of the current thinking and modeling of how to foster innovative ideas, products, and services (www.managementexchange.com).

Instead, though very much relatedly, his emphasis is on innovating management and organizations themselves. In a recent video, he discusses with a VP from Dell how the web and social media are not just tools but increasingly the operating system for our lives. The key lesson for leaders is the need for them to embrace the openness and adaptability of the web and social media in organizational design, operations, and strategy. Not an easy task, particularly with the ceding of centralized command and control it requires, but more and more a necessary one to enable success. The video is under 5 minutes long and very much worth the time.

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