Management Perspectives

MYTH 1: It is all about moonshots and disruption nowadays.

Look around and you will hear many leaders saying “think disruptively” and “shoot for the moon,” but, unless they are in the business of space exploration, this is totally useless. As companies are on the hunt for billion-dollar ideas, the concept of disruptive moonshots takes precedence over small, measurable milestones. In the process, teams lose touch with reality, lack accountability, focus on the high-tech flavour of the month, miss out on clear opportunities to innovate, and, in the end, fail.

While driving transformation initiatives for Fortune 100 companies in India, Australia, the UK, the USA, Italy, Germany, and other countries, I have learned that more often than not, ‘thinking disruptively’ is counterproductive nonsense. Relying on disruption as a strategy or plan creates a mindset that your company needs to have a magical billion-dollar idea that alters the foundation of everything—a cataclysmic burst of creativity that creates a new market. As you can imagine, these events are very rare.

To drive real impact in your organisation, stop thinking disruptively and start acting pragmatically. Instead of demanding illusive and irrelevant ideas, you will be producing tangible results that make sense for your business.

MYTH 2: Inventors drive the business forward.

In popular culture and historical narratives, a myth persists about the ‘lonely inventor’, working night and day until they come up with an idea so perfect that it blows everyone’s minds, and becomes an overnight sensation and commercial success.

The truth is, most inventions produce zero results. I was once working on an intellectual property value research project with one of the world’s top accounting firms and discovered that most of the patented inventions are completely worthless, with less than 5 per cent of patents commercialised or licensed. So, working in solitude may lead to less-than useful inventions, but not commercial innovation, because the latter requires extensive team collaboration.

Contrary to popular belief, Alexander Graham Bell did not solely invent the phone, Samuel Morse did not invent telegraph, and Thomas Edison did not come up with the lightbulb—they co-innovated with others.

Innovation is a team sport, and it only happens thanks to groups of people working together to achieve specific goals. Innovation is at its best when it is a result of collaboration by inclusive, diverse, cross-functional teams that are empowered to make decisions and enact change.

As a leader, it is your job to create an environment where teams like these can emerge and succeed.

MYTH 3: It takes a special ‘innovation team’ to succeed.

Sadly, corporate innovation is still disproportionately invested into a select few creative technology intrapreneurs, with cool offices and little accountability. The expectation is that these special technology teams will come up with the next big thing and somehow later help save the business and make it grow. In reality, organisations end-up creating siloed teams of overcompensated employees who are disconnected from the rest of the business. Truth is, innovation belongs to everyone and great ideas can come from anywhere.

While implementing Fortune magazine’s ‘Best Companies To Work For’ employee innovation programs, I had taken a step to expand innovation programs beyond Silicon Valley technology and engineering teams, thus creating opportunities for every employee regardless of job role, location, and function. The results were mind blowing. Most of the successful and commercially viable ideas came not from Silicon Valley, but from India, far outpacing the US and UK. Contrary to conventional belief, the most impactful projects did not come from building new technology products, but rather from changing and optimising different processes, saving the company over $500 million. The best teams were not the famous organisational innovators, but freshers, just entering employment and teaming up together, bringing their new outlook into the organisation.

I repeated this approach while working with National Geographic and former captain of England’s men’s international cricket team, Kevin Pietersen. When looking for ideas on best ways to protect rhinos from poaching and natural disasters in Kaziranga National Park, I searched for ideas in the community. The solutions to the human-wildlife conflict, flood and disaster response, and health and sanitation came from a wide range of employees, coming together sharing the common passion for the environment.

To make your organisation successful, stop creating two classes of employees—the innovators and the other workers. Rather, work to give everyone a voice and listen carefully to what is being said.

MYTH 4: To be successful, your key investments should be in technology and new products.

Now is the time when many leaders are looking to the future, deciding where to invest their valuable efforts and resources. Investments into technology, digital transformation, and new products is undoubtedly high on the agenda.

My 25 years of experience in driving digital transformation programs shows that many of these efforts will fail to get off the ground or get adopted due to lack of effective communication.

Ironically, investment in communications is generally the last priority in many technologically-savvy organisations. While talking to my peers in leading technology companies around the world, I have discovered that leaders pour money into hardware, software, and engineering capabilities; basically anything but communication.

The irony is undeniable: given the pace of technology, many technical skills will be obsolete within a few years, but leaders are happy to fund their development.

Communication skills and shared institutional knowledge, however, will stay with employees throughout the rest of their careers, benefiting all.

As a leader, you must understand the importance of communication, then nurture and fund it properly. Your vision, strategy, plan, and metrics must be communicated across the organisation. You also need to demonstrate the value you are generating and how your organisation is capturing that value to help employees, customers, partners, and the public.

The single most critical element that separates innovation success from failure is communication. After all, sustainable and successful transformation requires us to communicate, communicate, communicate! And then? Communicate some more.

MYTH 5: Innovation either happens or it doesn’t. It can’t be orchestrated.

In a perfect world, innovation would be so seamlessly intertwined with an organisation, it would be unnoticeable, and the need for cross-company governance and innovation metric would cease to exist. Until then, however, they are absolutely vital for your organisation to be successful.

LEGO is the world-class brand name that comes to mind when I think of organisations that survived thanks to focused innovation efforts. Twenty years ago, LEGO was deeply in debt, on the verge of bankruptcy, and no one would have guessed that the company would grow and blossom into one of the world’s largest toy companies. Facing major competition from video games and computers, paired with shrinking toy stores around the world, LEGO took the ‘ignore it’ approach, hiding behind a false confidence and failing to take action or even admit that the industry was being disrupted.

It took a new CEO, an outsider to the business, to realise that a new approach was necessary, setting the company on a path of open innovation and radically changing the business. LEGO exited non-core businesses like computer games and amusement parks and doubled down on innovation.

The R&D Future Lab team was established and tasked with developing low-risk, lowcost minimum viable prototypes that could quickly be created and tested. Contrary to the way typical companies work, the team shared early prototypes with customers and pivoted based on the feedback, before making any substantial investments in new products. This feedback created a more customer-centric experience, up-to-date with current trends, and resulted in new lines such as LEGO Architecture and LEGO Friends, which turned out to be one of LEGO’s biggest successes in the company’s history. Fast forward 20 years, the company continues to be on the cutting edge of innovation, experimenting with digital technologies and metaverse.

It is no secret that companies die, and the reason is not a secret either. As in the past, future progress can only be enabled through innovation, and businesses must take this sentiment to heart or face the consequences. It does not matter what the excuse is for inaction; failure to act for any reason will produce the same negative results time and time again. That is why a sense of urgency and duty must be instilled throughout your organisation—from employees to middle managers to the CEO and the board.

If innovation is not a focused effort, you are going to be left behind. “But, wait!” you might say, “Doesn’t innovation belong to everyone? Didn’t I just read that a mere few paragraphs ago in this very article, Alex?” True, it most certainly does belong to everyone. When I think about this question, I think of a quote from Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman: “When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition.”