innovate

Three Common Innovation Mistakes

    Company leaders love to talk about innovation.  When was the last time your company came out with something really new? How long has it been since you totally reinvented a critical business process that resulted in significant cost savings or productivity increases?  If you can’t remember (or you can remember but it’s been…

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Back from Down Under

Regular readers of my blog know that I occasionally complain about the seemingly endless travel required of a globe-hopping consultant/keynote speaker. Well, sometimes it is worth all that effort and hassle. Last month I had the pleasure of spending several weeks in Australia and New Zealand as a guest of The Executive Connection (TEC), Australia’s…

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10 Brainteasers to Stretch Your Brain

Earlier this year, I posted a blog entitled “Tease Your Brain.”  It offered 10 brainteasers that showed how our preconceived notions, combined with the brain’s tendency to see what it wants or expects to see, greatly affect how we solve problems and make decisions. To my amazement, it quickly became one of the most popular…

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The Winning Attitude Tipping Point

As business leaders, everything we do should focus on setting our organizations up to win. But we can’t do it all ourselves. Which means we also need to get our employees obsessive and relentless about winning – a task much easier said than done. If you’re struggling to build a winning attitude in your organization,…

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Play to Win!

Did you catch the New Orleans Saints/Detroit Lions game last Saturday? What an exciting game between two high-powered offenses! And once again, the sports world offered a powerful lesson for business leaders. Specifically, I’m referring to Saints coach Sean Payton and how he approaches the game of football. Now there’s a coach who plays to…

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Test Your Innovation IQ

Everyone knows that innovation means coming up with the next great idea in your industry, right? Actually, there’s a lot more to it than that. Test your ability to separate innovation fact from fiction by answering the following questions true or false: Innovation is the act of coming up with new and creative ideas. Innovation…

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Tear Down These Walls!

In 1987, president Ronald Reagan gave his famous speech in which he implored Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” I’m going to paraphrase his history-altering quote and urge today’s business leaders to tear down these walls! Which walls? The ones that get in the way of cross-communication within organizations and prevent…

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The Real Recipe for Innovation

When I talk to business leaders, I always ask about the most difficult challenges they face day in and day out. Increasingly, I’m hearing about how hard it is to innovate on a consistent basis. This anecdotal evidence is now being supported by a recent McKinsey Global Survey that polled more than 2,200 senior executives…

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Creativity: The New Leadership Imperative

Last week I wrote about how the IBM report, “Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Study,” suggested that a majority of CEOs around the globe felt ill-prepared to deal with the increasing complexity in today’s business world. In response to this finding, IBM asked business leaders to prioritize the three most important…

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Innovating Every Day

Who doesn’t recognize the need to constantly innovate today? After all, just look around at all that is new in our world in the past few years. Are you twittering? 1 million+ others are. Do you have a product or service video up on YouTube? 25 million+ people do. And are you LinkedIn or participating…

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