Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Why Do Some Innovations Succeed While Others Fail?
Transcription of interview with Jane Stevenson on September 12, 2011.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Jane Edison Stevenson is the vice chairman of Korn/Ferry International, which is based
in Atlanta. She has written a groundbreaking book about innovation leadership with Bilal
Kaafarani, Breaking Away, which came out in April and was published by McGraw-Hill.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Stevenson on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Jane Stevenson: Innovation leadership is really great leadership because to really be a leader
of people, you’ve got to engage them and bring out the creative capabilities that they
bring to the table. What we’ve done is to write about how innovation and leadership
are inextricably linked to be effective.
Douglas Goldstein: What got you and your co-author to decide to actually write the book?
Jane Stevenson: I actually recruited Bilal to his last position as head of innovation
at the Coca Cola Company. In the process of interviewing him, he had mentioned that he
wanted to write a book at some point and share the learning that he had around creating breakthrough
products like fat-free cheese and a number of other things for which he was accountable.
I always had a goal to write a book as well and in 2009, I decided to take a sabbatical,
and Bilal said, “It would be great if, on your sabbatical, we worked on writing a book
and you brought to bear 26 years of leadership assessment and selection.” So I used my
experience as an innovation leader and we created a real framework.
Douglas Goldstein: Is there something new these days about leadership compared to 50
years ago, or do we learn from what people did 50 years ago?
Jane Stevenson: One of the things that we did was to look through time from the earliest
days to today at innovation and leadership and how things happened. Very interestingly,
the principles that were underlying hadn’t changed one iota. I am not sure that there’s
something that’s totally new and different about society tending to go in cycles. I think
the era of cost-cutting has taken it as far as it can go and you can’t cut your way
to growth forever. Innovation and growth are pretty much synonymous and for today’s environment,
leadership and looking at how you grow business and how you really pull out what’s next
on an ongoing basis and create sustained growth is very relevant - maybe more so than it’s
been during the beginning of the down cycle.
Douglas Goldstein: What is it that makes a good leader?
Jane Stevenson: What makes a good leader is very simple. While it can vary depending on
the person, what makes a great leader is somebody who has a vision that he or she convinces
others can be achieved and then is able to really bring out all the capabilities through
the team to achieve that. That’s what makes a great leader.
Now, what are the qualities and the characteristics? It could be that someone who is quiet in style.
It could be that someone who is very dynamic and charismatic, but underlying there’s
a level of trust that people have to have for the leader. There is an ability to communicate
and to articulate a vision that people understand and can relate to and there needs to be an
understanding of what drives the business to be effective and then there are a lot of
other intangibles. We spend a whole chapter on leadership characteristics and then actually
break it out into specific leadership characteristics for different types of innovation, and each
company’s business strategy is going to use the different elements of innovation in
different ways.
Douglas Goldstein: Could someone who is loud be a successful as someone who is more soft
spoken?
Jane Stevenson: I think that’s really less relative to ‘either or.’ I think being
treated as who you are is pretty important. I don’t find in the work that I do that
someone who is innately shy and tries to be bombastic is necessarily successful or vice
versa, but I think the style that you bring to bear can be effective across the wide continuum.
It’s really about how you engage other people.
For sometimes, I think leadership is mistaken. It is often the front and center, but the
most effective leaders are the ones that engage other people in a way that makes them something
they would not be without the leader in place. I always feel that a measure of leadership
is, whether that be the CEO and the team, the whole company or division, the question
of if your team has accomplished things that they probably wouldn’t have if you weren’t
the leader. This is a good measure to look at as a self-evaluation technique because
a great leader helps people to see what’s possible and puts them together in a way that
creates an exponential outcome.
Douglas Goldstein: If someone comes up with a new product, what advice would you give
them to help them make it a success?
Jane Stevenson: I think there are a lot of things that go into that and every product
is a little different, so I’m not going to give you a silver bullet answer. That said,
we have a formula in the book that I think is helpful relative to this, and it’s called
the three Ws. I’m not talking about the internet, we are talking about “Who, What
and Why” in the product development lifecycle. If you look at what it is that you’re offering
and you understand who it’s for and why the business case is going to be successful,
and you’ve got the best ads for success, and where those all intersect and overlay,
this is what we call the ‘sweet spot.’ We go into a lot of about this in the book,
but there are series of questions that need to be understood and in terms of understanding
that your product is going to be a big success. If you understand what it is that’s being
offered and then how that overlays with not only what people are looking for, but the
price that it will cost to deliver it profitably then that’s a pretty good formula that’s
going to help you understand what the success is.
With innovation, there’s a lot of risks and there are always risks because you don’t
understand what the social adoption cycle might be if it’s a truly transformational
type of innovation, but the more questions you have answered, the less risk there is
in terms of the WWW equation. When you look at organizations like Apple and others that
have been tremendously successful from an innovation standpoint, you’ll find that
they understood what the customer would want if they knew something was possible rather
than perhaps the potential customer knew themselves.
It’s a lot about consumer insight, and that isn’t just ‘consumers’ in the sense
of individuals like you and I that buy something at the store, but in the B2B context as well.
The insight around what is needed and how it can be produced and understanding what
it takes to make that product or service available and successful and the business case behind
it that allows you to deliberate in a way that is consistent with the value that the
person is willing to pay, that’s the magic formula in our opinion.
Douglas Goldstein: One of the areas that people often talk about
with innovation is that the idea needs to be packaged the right way. Do you think that
people are buying products just because of a certain flashy packaging?
Jane Stevenson: I think packaging is important because it needs to resonate to the buyer,
whether that buyer is a corporate buyer or an individual buyer. I think understanding
how it will impact and change your life is probably the most important element. Whether
that’s just looking at the packaging, hearing something or through word of mouth, I think
viral communications through Facebook, LinkedIn, Tweeter and all of these mechanisms that are
having a huge impact on how people think about new products, offerings, and services and
how people engaged in utilizing these techniques is also very powerful.
Social adoption is a tough thing to predict as well, so the bigger the breakthrough, the
less you can predict what the time line will be. You’d have to have a framework. There
are different types of innovation and depending on what new paradigm is being created has
a direct activity to whether it’s just the packaging or the ideology or whether it’s
hearing about it, working from a friend that you know and trust. If it’s a small innovation
and it’s an enhancement then I’d say marketing and packaging and all these things have a
huge, huge impact. If it’s a paradigm shift that really takes us into a new territory
that’s never been developed before, then I think it’s probably a little more than
that and it requires people who have success with it. Look at the hybrid car, look at anything
even through time like telephone and cell phones, on and on, the cycle for when people
take that on board and say, “Hey, this is something that’s changed my life and it’s
just something I take for granted.” That’s usually a longer cycle time.
Douglas Goldstein: Could you tell people how they could learn more about your work or get
a copy of the book?
Jane Stevenson: You can get the book on any online bookstore like Barnes & Noble, Amazon,
or any of those. It’s widespread. We have a website called www.breakingawaythebook.com,
which has a bunch of information and interviews and other things on it that might be worth
taking a look at as well, and there are reviews on most of the online site as well.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel. Securities offered
through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA. Accounts carried
by National Financial Services LLC. Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
Disclaimer: This document is a transcription and/or an educational article. While it is
believed to be current and accurate, divergence from the original is to be expected. The original
podcast can be heard at https://sites.google.com/site/goldsteinradioshows/. All information on this website is purely
information and should not be used as the sole basis for making financial decisions.
The opinions rendered herein are those of the guests, and not necessarily those of Douglas
Goldstein, Profile Investment Services, Ltd., or Israel National News. Readers should consult
with a professional financial advisor before making any financial decisions. Please see
the complete disclaimer at https://sites.google.com/site/goldsteinradioshows/.