In the ever-changing world of business, we’ve arrived at a point where process 
has trumped culture, where the race toward efficiency has made us complacent and unable to reach our potential. Stuck in the land of status quo, we’ve forgotten how to think. And the very structures put in place to help businesses grow are now holding them back. It’s time to Kill the Company
.
Lisa Bodell, founder of the internationally recognized innovation research and training firm futurethink, explains that with the right knowledge and tools, everyone has the power to innovate.
There are many key skills that make up an innovative company.
And these skills and behaviors I think are important for people to know. I don’t think any one person typically has all these skills or exemplifies all these behaviors, but it’s important as a small company or your team to have a mix of these so you can be very innovative or better embrace change. So let me tell you what those are.
The first is strategic imagination.
And what I mean by that is dreaming with purpose. There are a lot of companies that are strategic, there are a lot of companies that are creative, but there are very few that have the blend of both. So you need dreaming with purpose and we call that strategic imagination.
The second thing I think you need is you need smart risk-taking.
So you need people that are willing to take risks within certain boundaries and they know what those boundaries are. When we talk about boundaries what we’re trying to get people to do is to stop operating with handcuffs and start operating with guardrails, and that’s something that a really good company does all the time.
The next thing is resiliency.
We think that winning companies or innovative companies are resilient. They do not give up when they are faced with unforeseen challenges, they know that when something fails that maybe that’s just getting them one step closer to the perfect solution, but they don’t give up.
Next is agility
Being able to deal with the wildcards because change is going to be constant.
And then finally it’s being future focused.
So if you’re a company that’s only looking to the next quarter, and most people say that they aren’t doing that but many of them are, that’s a problem. You need people that are looking far beyond the next quarter or the next year but actually thinking about trends the next ten or 20 years out to not stay ahead of the curve but look way beyond the curve.
Complement Kill the Company with The Innovator’s Cookbook: essentials for inventing what’s next.