Business innovation requires leadership innovation
When should leaders question their way of thinking and doing?
When we work with companies to help them develop their future direction, often the leadership team is not aligned on how big the required business transformation is. Some might feel business innovation is a matter of continuous improvement, while others might think the company has arrived at a so-called ‘Kodak-moment’ that calls for a revolution of the business model. However, what most leadership teams have in common is that they rarely question whether their own team’s composition and behavior fit the desired future.
The role of the leadership team is a recurring theme when you study past business innovation cases such as Kodak, Thomas Cook and Puma. Companies often go bankrupt because the leaders have failed to recognize that their product was at the end of its lifecycle and/or didn’t bring in new ways of thinking and doing soon enough. Kodak was the first company to develop a digital camera but underestimated the fact that people were willing to compromise on technical quality for the sake of convenience. Thomas Cook’s bankruptcy had several reasons; one of them was the lack of digital transformation expertise in their leadership team. Puma is an example of a company that did survive - after almost going bankrupt - thanks to the then new CEO Jochen Zeitz who successfully transformed Puma from sports to fashion. Puma was the first sports company to work with fashion designers such as Jil Sanders and Alexander McQueen, but not only did Zeitz bring in new external partners, he also appointed new board members adding right-brain skills like empathy (understanding consumer behavior) and creativity (fashion design).
Learning from both these well-known cases and our clients, we now always explore both the need for business and leadership innovation. Does the future direction call for evolution or revolution? And what new ways of leadership thinking and doing are needed in each of those scenarios to make the desired future a success? Realizing that business and leadership innovation go hand in hand is the start of the actual transformation journey.
Have you ever wondered whether your leadership team is future-fit? Would your business innovation efforts benefit from developing right-brain skills?