How To Keep Innovating
“We need to innovate to thrive.”
“Business has to be agile these days.”
“The cheese has moved.”
“Every market sector will face disruption.”
We’ve all heard these phrases haven’t we? “Innovate” and “agile” and “disruption”, what do these trendy words mean?
Well, believe it or not, there’s nothing new under the sun. All these trendy sayings mean something that businesses have had to do for centuries – we all need to move with the times. If you settle, you go the way of Kodak and Blackberry, and in the sense of industries, you face the challenges of the taxi industry in the face of Uber or of the hotel industry when Air BnB is out there.
So you have to innovate. You have to be aware of what is happening around you, to your business, to your customers, to your industry, to your market, and find new ways of doing things or new ways to serve. Yet business success is a game of inches, not Eureka moments.
If you expect miracles, you set up your mindset for the BIG new thing to invent. This makes people feel nervous because they will find it hard to innovate at such a big leap. So they react by working on what they know, and innovation? Nothing.
You need to shift mindsets – yours and those of your team. Believe that innovation is possible but you do it through small improvements. If people are allowed to change their world with small improvements, then they are not afraid to fail because if they do fail, it’s small. When a good attempt has not succeeded, don’t label it a failure – accept that an experiment has given you a result and ask “what did we learn to do/not to do?”
And remember to measure. Take simple measurements like time saved, or cost saved – feel the progress and celebrate, then look for more.
Finally if you are reading this on one of my social media channels, you might be missing a lot of great ideas and tools and resources to help you grow your business, create effective strategy and show leadership. Why don’t you go to my website at teikoh.com and sign up to get these free ideas sent directly to your inbox (not forgetting to mark the email from teikoh.com as safe so that it doesn’t go straight to your spam folder.
See you next week!
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