“Soon really connected with our audience. In fact, he was the most requested speaker to bring back again.”
Innovation and Design Leadership
After almost 20 years of leading innovation and design for large multi-national corporations and for smaller startups, I have learned important lessons that can help you create more lasting competitive advantage.
Creating Iconic Advantage: Don't just milk the cow, butter it up!
Before chasing what's new, consider innovating what's OLD…
Growing iconic brand and product franchises is a conscious and deliberate strategy for success, and requires strong and coordinated design, innovation, and marketing capabilities. Come learn what new best practices are required to fully leverage this competitive advantage, especially in a world where consumers are gravitating towards fast fashion and commoditized products.
Motivating & Inspiring a Winning Innovation Culture
Making innovation successful starts and ends with people. For large matrixed, multi-national firms, finding a common innovation vision, language and action steps can be a daunting task. Working with Chip & Dan Heath (authors of Switch, the preeminent book on "How to Change Things When Change is Hard"), learn how to develop a program to direct the "rider" (the analytical side) and motivate the "elephant" (the emotional side) to win with innovation.
Fail to Innovate: How to make failing a competitive advantage.
A young IBM executive, who just lost millions in series of blunders, was called to a meeting with Tom Watson, the CEO. He asked Tom whether they were going to fire him and instead Tom replied, “Not at all, young man, we have just spent a couple of million dollars educating you.” Everyone knows that failure is part of any innovation journey – but how can you turn this failure into a competitive advantage?
T Shaped Leadership: Winning ideas only win if they are sold.
The days of a “great idea that sells itself” are gone. Organizations are facing greater complexity from an explosion of technologies, new business models and changing consumer expectations. Great ideas, while being the possible solution to these challenges, face an even greater challenge to sustain organizational momentum in the midst of all this complexity. To achieve success, a “T shaped” leadership model must be applied to innovate. A model that goes beyond just developing inspired ideas to the organizational influencing skills required to execute them.