Frances Hesselbein is chairman of the board of governors of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management and editor in chief for its journal, Leader to Leader. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America's highest civilian honor, in 1998.
Marshall Goldsmith is founding director of the Financial Times Knowledge Dialogue, a coaching network that connects executives worldwide with thought leaders. He has been listed in Forbes magazine as one of five top executive coaches.
Iain Somerville is a strategy consultant, executive educator, and social entrepreneur. As managing partner of Somerville & Associates, he engages businesses, governments, and community-based organizations in bringing about breakthrough economic and social results.
(source: wiley.com)
Innovation: change that create a new dimension of performance. This is how Drucker defines it. Innovation has always been a primary challenge of leadership. Today we live in an era of such rapid change and evolution that leaders must work constantly to develop the capacity for continuous change and frequent adaptation, while ensuring that identity and values remain constant.
They must recognize people’s innate capacity to adapt and create- to innovate. This is based on the experience of the foundation’s experience in three sectors of mission, management of innovation, and finally managing of the diversity. They have discussed the two functions of Drucker’s like marketing and innovation, that when they are joined new results are achieved.
Leading for Innovation brings together several modern and other thought leaders to offer a practical guidance on leading your organization to a new dimension of performance. This unprecedented collection explores the unique qualities required to lead innovators, and shows you the way to develop a culture that promotes innovation.
An enterprise is defined as a systematic purposeful activity. This applies to business, industry, academic, government, and military organizations. Every new enterprise starts with a vision. This vision is translated into an enterprise-level mission statement and set of goals. In order to achieve the goals, satisfy the mission requirements, and achieve the vision, eight critical functions need to be performed. All of these functions need to be performed within the enterprise, no matter how large or small, whether business, industry, or government:
1. Strategic planning
2. Market and customer research and communication
3. Research and technology development
4. Product, service, and process design
5. Product and service commercialization
6. Post launch production
7. Product and service support
8. Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management
The contributors encourage you to take the time to think about innovation and describe how you must abandon practices that no longer work for advancing the practice of innovation. Filled with specific examples of the hands-on work needed to make innovation a reality for leaders and their organizations, Leading for Innovation offers a wealth of thoughtful and incisive essays that will help leaders everywhere take their organizations and communities to a new level of excellence.
Writers mentioned mainly that leadership is needed to support innovation in organizations and communities across the country and the world. It is all dependent on leaders to focus on performance and results and then discover all the ways for success to travel. Every section presents several stand alone essays that come from very diverse backgrounds and yet tie into the primary theme for each section. Most present some insight or nuggets that can be gleaned and applicable in any organization.
The book is basically divided into four parts namely
· Leading the People Who Make Innovation Happen
Which basically addresses that basically every person in the world is innovative to some extent, but it depends on leaders how he/she actually lead and motivate them who have ideas but can’t say due to different reasons. But it requires from leader as well that if he/she is creative him/herself because unless he/she is creative, a leader cannot actually initiate their innovative ideas. Also they have discussed in a best way that success can be achieved and to be successful is the change in behavior and this is what most of successful business person have been doing especially leaders for having success.
Also they mentioned that good behaviors are not enough, with this the combination of good work is also required. Everyone knows that if someone has nothing, he/she have nothing to produce. A leader should protect the creative person from the bureaucracy and legalism so ensconced in our organization. Beside this, a leader should set an example for openness, imagination and acceptance.
A leader should also know that it is basically the behaviors that leader and his/her team should have in order to succeed. And a good professional is one who learns from mistakes and errors and then properly reflect through their actions. This whole relates with the second section of the book named:
· Creating An Environment That Encourages Innovation
Which address that innovations cannot flourish in an organization unless there is a culture for it to happen and it’s again the responsibility of the leader to create the culture for and environment for the better and useful innovations for the organization. Which in one way also to tell leaders that they must also change their thinking as well about innovations and team culture this is also mentioned in the articles of third section. Changing How You Think About Leadership And Innovation
· The Practice of Innovation
And finally with everything working and being initiated especially the leader then it comes of making the innovations to the level of one’s organization and one author uses a special term INNOVATIVE PROTOCOL for key players in the process of idea generation, impact on organization, integration and finally improvement. But with this protocol a leader must also keep checking the growth rate and that sometimes the innovation may kill the organization’s structure and stop progress. And sometimes it may also happen that there remain a vast gap between the aspiration to innovation and its reality.
Excellent compilation on Leadership attributes for innovation and is a collection of well written articles which made me think and connect to a real world phenomenon. In short, each chapter is short and easy to absorb, but the collection provides a powerful set of ideas about how leaders can make innovation happen in their organization, whether it's a business, a nonprofit, or a government.
