Comments

interesting feature. BW seems to be have jumped all over the innovation thing in recent weeks. as for women getting a fair shake in the executive suite, i'll believe it when I see it.

Posted by Ken Cameron at June 13, 2006 2:37 PM

If Chief Innovation Officer--or whatever they choose to call it--becomes a permanent fixture, this will lead to not only more women in the C-Suite, but to more women CEOS. Such is the power of innovation.

Posted by Jan at June 13, 2006 9:03 PM

Women have to be more innovative.
Just getting to a corner office in male dominated managerial ranks demands it.

Posted by K at June 13, 2006 10:09 PM

Has innovation cut a permanent hole in the ceiling? Not yet!
The heavy weights are realizing the value of this and 'consciously' pushing for it. Thats good. But for it to be a permanent feature, it needs to be widespread in all sizes of business and practiced subconsciously. Blink!

Posted by shiv vithal at June 14, 2006 6:54 AM

innovation is more than flavor of the month but only time will tell if it's internalized. btw, 3.7 million references for innovation in google. leadership gets 4.4 million.

Posted by Ken Cameron at June 14, 2006 9:28 AM

Ken - when will men get a fair shake at universities - approaching 70% women grads now - new affirmative action needed?

Posted by Sean at June 14, 2006 10:46 AM

I don't think there's any hole in the ceiling yet because of a new emphasis on innovation. Nor is there likely to be one.

Creativity and innovation have always been part of business because they're natural to people. What we're going through now is one of our cyclic periods of talking about innovation. That seems to happen about every ten years.

The fact is that people naturally come up with ideas. Some of them are related to work. Some of them are good. If you, as the boss, let them share their ideas and try them out, some of them will become innovations and actually work.

If you, as the boss, don't let folks share their ideas, they will innovate anyway. And when you walk off the shop floor, the neat jigs and fixtures that your people have come up with will emerge from closets and drawers to make life better for the workers without helping you much at all.

Ultimately, the innovation issue becomes part of the larger issue of leadership. By and large, it seems that treating people like people and encouraging the things that people do well leads to better results. It also seems that we will do better when we can use all of the talents of all the people we've got. That's the reason we need to make it possible for just about every classification except white guys like me to get a shot at making a difference.

Posted by Wally Bock at June 14, 2006 10:56 AM

Re the leadership issue, Wally, I should confess my bias that innovation/design thinking etc. be considered a TEAM phenomenon. That’s not to say we don’t need strong individual leadership from executives championing innovations (such as these new “CIOs”) but these individuals need to create (or ALLOW) teams to get it done. And my experience is that women have a huge head start (we can debate why on another occasion) in understanding this. So it’s good news that women seem to be heading up the innovation movement in the corporate world. But perhaps it’s wishful thinking on my part that this will deal a death blow to the paternalistic, pyramidal structures of the Old Order!

Posted by John O'Leary at June 14, 2006 1:33 PM

So many women on the innovators list! Wonderful! And K, I second what you said. Ain't that the truth.

Posted by Macy at June 14, 2006 2:26 PM

very interesting... if increased innovation is a product of women moving into the executive suite while increased innovation, as K points out, is a necessary condition or prerequisite for women to move into the executive suite this suggests a positive “reinforcing loop" is at work here.

maybe I should be more optimistic about the future.

Posted by Ken Cameron at June 14, 2006 11:01 PM

I don't think we disagree, John. Let me expand on my earlier post and we'll see.

Innovation, as opposed to creativity, is almost always a team sport. The only place that individuals innovate much is in one-person operations.

What leaders should be about is not some much championing innovation, though that may be necessary in some companies and cultures. What leadership should be about is setting direction, defining values and all of that to create the atmosphere where innovation (a natural human activity) happens without anyone having to champion it.

Another way to look at this is that it's not the leader's job to "create an environment where risk taking is encouraged." Instead it's to create an atmosphere where the normal process of trying things isn't a risk.

Posted by Wally Bock at June 15, 2006 3:14 PM

Brilliant, Wally. I'd like to quote your last two sentences in my upcoming book, with proper credit.

Posted by John O'Leary at June 15, 2006 5:00 PM

I have to admit I was disappointed with BusinessWeek's innovation foray. My reasons are detailed here:
http://brentblog.typepad.com/brentblog/2006/06/businessweek_ge.html

In short, I thought that the stories were somewhat trivial and didn't have the level of quality journalism that marks the regular articles in BusinessWeek.

Posted by Brent Edwards at June 15, 2006 11:56 PM

Quote away, John. I'm honored.

If you are going to point folks to me, please use either the Three Star Leadership Web site (http://www.threestarleadership.com)or Three Star Leadership Blog (http://blog.threestarleadership.com)

Posted by Wally Bock at June 16, 2006 4:14 PM

Hmmmm. Haven't we heard this before from Someone else????

Posted by Tom Dillard at June 19, 2006 1:57 PM

The key to your organisation’s growth on the global market is innovation. Throw away tradition, corner offices, titles and perks. Rethink both your organisational structure and your products. This calls for an innovation of the company’s mental model aka the way employees and leaders think about the way the company is run. If you think you’ve found the right “formula” – think again. In my experience fixed ways of doing things such as “The HP way” are the first signs of commercial disaster. Instead, bring in new people with different and unusual educational backgrounds, mix then all up and witness how your company takes the lead on the market and more importantly stays there. As I’m currently in Nicaragua I’ve also discovered that not only the corporate world needs innovation, the mental model of the industrial countries in their dealings with third world countries screams for it. This is also the current topic on my blog www.thesecondcycle.com.

Posted by Lars Kolind at June 22, 2006 12:05 PM