JULY 2010

In business as in other spheres, traditional thinking and beliefs are constantly under challenge. Agility Update this month draws your attention to ideas currently under challenge including: group brainstorms deliver innovations, we learn more from our failures than our successes; and customer-focus in organisations is genuine. A final article looks at the growing importance of creativity as a leadership quality.

Time Alone Essential for Innovation
Time alone rather than group sessions is what’s needed to come up with innovations like the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook. In a paper titled, "Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea," Wharton operations and information management professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich argue that group dynamics are the enemy of businesses trying to develop one-of-a-kind new products, unique ways to save money or distinctive marketing strategies. The professors suggest businesses adopt a hybrid process of idea generation combining individual ‘brainstorming’ to generate ideas in the early stages followed by group evaluation. The hybrid method, the professors found, generated 30% more ideas of generally better quality than the traditional group sessions. Read more at:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2487

The Most Important Leadership Quality for CEOs? Creativity
For CEOs, creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking, according to a new study by IBM. The study is the largest known sample of one-on-one CEO interviews, with over 1,500 corporate heads and public sector leaders across 60 nations and 33 industries worldwide.
Other interesting findings included a large disparity between the weighting of North American CEOs and those from other territories on the importance of integrity. In North America, 65% of CEOs think integrity is a top quality for tomorrow's leaders, versus 29-48% of CEOs in other territories.  And, nearly double the number of CEOs in China view global thinking as a top leadership quality, compared with Europe and North America. Not surprisingly 88% of all CEOs, and 95% of standout leaders, believe getting closer to the customer is the top business strategy over the next five years. Read more at:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1648943/creativity-the-most-important-leadership-quality-for-ceos-study?partner=best_of_newsletter  or
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/31670.wss

Is Your Company as Customer- Focused as You Think?
“Getting closer to the customer” was cited as the top business strategy by the majority of chief Executives in the IBM CEO Survey. But, is your company as customer-focused as you think? Writing in the MIT Sloan Management Review, two professors say that, based on their interactions with scores of companies, management’s assumptions about the organisation’s commitment to customers are often based on wishful thinking. However, managers can overcome this tendency and diagnose where the weaknesses lie by posing the following five questions:

1. Can middle managers accurately describe your customer promise?
2. Can all members of your senior executive team name the three things that most undermine trust among your existing customers?
3. Is your brand really the best option for customers? Will it continue to be next month and next year?
4. Have you embraced any novel ideas that have produced significant innovations beyond the familiar during the past year?
5. Have front-line staff posed any uncomfortable questions or suggested any important improvements to your offering during the last three months?

Unless senior managers are able to answer yes to all five of them, there is an actionable opportunity for improvement, the professors advised. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2010/spring/51304/is-your-company-as-customer-focused-as-you-think/

Can You Learn From Failure?
A classic business mantra is: You learn more from your failures than your successes. However recent research by a team at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory seems set to overturn this mantra. Neuroscientists have long understood that the brain can rewire itself in response to experience – a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity – and the study team found that we absorb more from success than from failure. This means that on a neurological level, if you get a reward, the brain remembers what it did right. But with failure, unless there is a clear negative consequence, the brain isn’t sure what to store, so it doesn’t change at all. However, lead researcher Earl Miller cautions against making too tidy a connection between his findings and an environment like the workplace. But he does offer this suggestion: “Maybe the lesson is to know that the brain will learn from success, and you don’t need to dwell on that. You need to pay more attention to failures and challenge why you fail.”  Read more at:
http://hbr.org/2010/01/success-gets-into-your-head-and-changes-it/ar/1 You may also be interested in a new book The Ambiguities of Experience by Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor James March. Details at:
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=5624