December 31, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
The Secret Sauce of Leadership Creativity
A survey conducted in 2010 by IBM Global Business Services revealed that a surprising 60% of global CEOs rated Creativity as the most important leadership quality needed in the coming years. Creativity beat out both integrity and global thinking in the…
December 31, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
We Need To Rethink Innovation For The 21st Century
One of the most interesting things I discuss in my book Mapping Innovation is what I call the new era of innovation, which will create profoundly new technologies, classes of data and business models. It is likely to be the most important shift we’ve seen in at least 50 years and perhaps in a century. …
December 30, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Manage your Innovation Pipeline exactly like your Sales Pipeline
Managing the Sales pipeline is a well-developed executive skill in any company selling large ticket items to business customers. Each sales person has to gather data and input their reports and forecasts. Some of the key actions in managing the pipeline include: Qualification questions have to be answered. Does the customer need our product? Do …
December 30, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
iRobot CEO’s Inadvertent Glimpse Of A Frightening Future Sent Their Stock Soaring
Our behaviors are becoming part of a vast digital ecosystem in which the most valuable product is YOU! Dog Against Machine iRobot was one of the earliest plays in the connected home market. Having developed robots for defense and space applications for…
December 29, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Three Phases of Embedding Innovation
Failure is real and should be feared. Ironically, fear of failure is the most potent saboteur. This is a fact proven time and time again in the world of innovation. Many expensive and time-consuming efforts to build innovation capability and capacity i…
December 28, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
End of The Year Message
2019 promises to be full of new opportunities to learn from one another and the one thing that is constant will be change! In 2018 we saw changes such as: More and more CPG companies turning to e-commerce for growth and direct-to-consumer connection — the convergence of online with brick-and-mortar, emphasis on the end-to-end consumer…
December 28, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
You Don’t Have an Innovation Problem, You Have a Trust Problem! (Part 3)
In the first part of this article mini-series I demonstrated, based on my original research, that for innovation to exist, you must be able to create a culture of innovation, first. A culture of innovation exists when leaders give their employees auton…
December 27, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
This Kind of Sleep Can Be Dangerous to Your Health
This bad habit may be increasing the risk of Alzheimers (and it’s not the amount of sleep you get) The spectrum of our intellectual and emotional states, from curiosity, learning, exploration, and innovation to joy, happiness, love, and sadness all stem from that wonderful clump of neurons no larger than our two fists pressed together; …
December 27, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
How Mental Models Drive Strategy the Wrong Way
Ideas fuel business. They drive how we respond to customer problems and leverage market opportunities. The right idea can make a business work and, over time, our successes become ingrained in our mental models. The opposite is also true. If we begin w…
December 26, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Voting Open – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2018
Innovation Excellence loves making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because we truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources the…
December 26, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
How to Compete Against Commoditycare
There are large variations in US sickcare. Surgery rates for a given condition vary depending on where you live and the costs are all over the map too. When it comes to outcomes, the numbers are hard to come by for any given doctor, so who knows? But, with advances in data acquistion and analytics, treatment metrics …
December 25, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Surviving & Thriving in the Entrepreneur’s Game
I was shocked to see in my calendar that it’s exactly 30 years since I exited my corporate career as a top retail executive at the now defunct Coles-Myer Group. I also realized that it’s also my 30-year anniversary as a serial entrepreneur who is not only still in a SME business, but is ploughing …
December 24, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Innovate Like Isaac Asimov – Lessons from An Innovator Years Ahead of His Time
It should be no surprise that innovation is a constantly evolving field. As innovators, it is in our nature to constantly evaluate, optimize and reinvent our models and processes. Indeed, how can we expect to help our clients to evolve and reinvent their products and services if we cannot continuously improve our own? However, sometimes …
December 24, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Innovation “Gurus” Love To Talk About These 4 Myths — None Of Them Are True
Go to any conference these days and innovation is almost sure to come up. When it does, you can be just as sure you will see something Steve Jobs said, something Elon Musk did (or plans to do) and some doomsday scenario about how robots will make us all obsolete (if they haven’t already). There …
December 23, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
5 Behaviours to Lead Successful Change
Just how do leaders energise their people to embrace change? The need for change is constant in a constantly changing business environment. Unfortunately, the failure rate of change projects has little changed in recent years, despite the increasing us…
December 23, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Science Says This 5-Second Rule Will Make Your Brain Stop Procrastinating
How to use neuroscience to beat procrastination and have more time for what really matters. I’ve been meaning to write this column for some time. The reason I’m finally getting to it is because it’s an excuse to avoid doing something else. Let’s face it, few of us, if we’re honest, wouldn’t confess to occasionally …
December 22, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Strategic Planning Rights and Wrongs
Strategic planning is one of those phrases like creativity or innovation. It means something different to each person who hears it based on his or her experiential application of the concept. In the broadest strokes there are three types of strategic planning. One: What strategy? Haven’t had one in too long and we’re doing okay. …
December 21, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
The Martial Arts of the Mind
Ten years ago I was invited to teach a course on “Innovation and Business Growth” at GE’s Crotonville Management Development Center for 75 high potential, business superstars of the future.
The GE executive who hired me was a very savvy guy with th…
December 21, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
3 DAYS LEFT – Nominate the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2018
Innovation Excellence loves making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because we truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources the…
December 21, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Next-Gen Restaurant Apps Are Changing the Industry
The restaurant industry is undergoing a major shift which corresponds with the retail industry, which is rapidly moving towards the digital world, online sales and digital apps. A recent report highlights how the restaurant industry is embracing digitization – and is increasingly dependent on digital and delivery sales. According to a report from Zacks, analysts …
December 20, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Startups Studio at Orange (Seasons 1 to 3)
The Intrapreneurs Studio program: from season 1 to season 2 In January 2017, we initiated the season 1 of the Intrapreneurs program in a 3 steps process, 1) Application, 2) Qualification, and 3) Incubation, as described in this previous post. In Januar…
December 20, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
The Truth About Diversity
“Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game,” Lou Gerstner wrote in the memoir of his historic turnaround at IBM, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? “It is the game. What does the culture reward and punish – individual achievement or team play, risk taking or consensus building?” Culture is, in many ways, is how an enterprise …
December 19, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Building a Smarter Workplace
I had the opportunity recently to interview Dave Hopping, President of Siemens Building Technologies for the Americas about technology advancements in the areas of construction and building management and their impact for both employers and employees. By its very name, Dave’s group focuses on technologies that go into buildings to make them safe, secure, efficient, …
December 19, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Steve Jobs Masterclass in Leadership via this 5 Second Strategy
One of the simplest and most powerful things you can do as a leader takes almost no time at all. I have a confession. I’m a pain in the ass (arse, for my colleagues speaking proper English) to work with. I thrive on impossible challenges and expect those I work with to do the same. …
December 19, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Ask For it by Name – Two lessons for Innovators
During WWI there was tremendous demand for bandages and sterile dressings for Allied wounded on the Western Front. The US company, Kimberly-Clark, developed a new cotton-like material from wood-pulp. It was highly absorbent. They manufactured this in large quantities to supply gas-mask filters and field dressings. When the war ended in 1918 the company was …
December 18, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Organizational Agility Requires Psychologically Safe Teams
Psychological safety is the absence of fear of exclusion or loss of status for being one’s self and openly expressing one’s thoughts and opinions. You can tell a team, operational group, or organizational environment is psychologically safe when its members are comfortable with open discussion of their most significant shortcomings Such environments do not focus on …
December 18, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
How do you do innovation?
If you had an idea for a medical device, would you know where to go at work to get help commercializing or deploying it in your organization? Most of the time, based on my experience, the answer is no. Giffford Pinchot, who originated the term “intrapreneur”, has suggested that you rate your organization in several …
December 17, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
One Genius Initiative That Ends the Generational Divide
Generation bashing is tearing organizations apart. Here’s a simple way to put an end to it. Iconic CEO Jack Welch came up with a way to bridge the generation gap in 1999 and yet almost 20 years later 86% of companies still haven’t caught on. In the late 1990’s GE’s iconic CEO, Jack Welch, did …
December 17, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
Nominate the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2018
Innovation Excellence loves making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because we truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources the…
December 17, 2018 | by Chris Kalaboukis
A Future of Software Without Code
Early digital computers weren’t very useful. Sure, they were far more powerful than the punch card tabulating machines that they replaced, but they were devilishly hard to program. Instructions needed to be written in assembly code, which was time consuming and difficult. That began to change when John Backus developed FORTRAN in the early 1950s, …