Innovation is a purposeful endeavor
April 14th, 2006
A hat tip to Chuck Frey over at Innovation Tools for sharing a classic Gary Hamel quotation from Leading the Revolution in his most recent newsletter:
“In the age of revolution, the challenge will be to marry radical innovation with disciplined execution — to merge the efficiency of a Toyota with the radical innovation of Silicon Valley, to blend diligence and curiosity.”
Once again, we learn from Hamel’s words that organizations must provide their people with the freedom to create and while building the discipline to implement their ideas. It is absolutely critical that association leaders come to regard innovation as a purposeful endeavor, rather than the accident of circumstance. While new opportunities often emerge because of serendipity, good luck will never be enough to fulfill our unrealized potential. We must match our creative spark with a genuine commitment to effective and intelligent action in support of that creativity.
Association leaders who think of innovation as a purely theoretical exercise miss a fundamental point: what made us successful in the past will not make us successful in the future. Placed in this context, the failure to innovate ceases to be a sin of omission. Instead, it becomes a sin of commission, a conscious choice to consign the organization to mediocrity or worse. In this age of revolution, such myopic stewardship is simply intolerable.
So, the challenge before you is clear. Will you step up?
If you're new here, I hope you will consider subscribing to the P.I. Blog. Just click on this link to add it to your RSS reader. You can also receive e-mail updates by subscribing via the box located on the blog itself. Thanks for visiting!
Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, Innovation, Associations
Ben Martin and P.I.
Association exec Ben Martin, CAE is P.I.’s Architect of Participation. Jeff and Ben help clients harness the power of the Web through the strategic application of social tools.
The AST Executive Summary
The executive summary of the groundbreaking Association Social Technologies survey project is now available for download! The full report will be available in October.
