Be Less Zombie

50Turning It On

‘Day One’ strategies for turning on innovation performance.

One of my favourite words is restitution. It means the restoration of something lost or stolen to its proper owner.

For many companies, that ‘something’ is their future prosperity, which suffers at the hands of today's choices.

My hope is that this book will help you become an agent of restitution inside your organisation. Turning on innovation in repeatable ways is one of the most important and valuable legacies that anyone can build inside a company.

But sometimes the hardest thing is knowing where to start. A senior vice president of an Australian bank once called me to talk about developing an innovation strategy. Towards the end of our call she said, ‘This is all really helpful. But what do I actually do on day one?’

It's a great question and inevitably the answer will depend on how innovation currently shows up inside your organisation. But assuming that you're starting from somewhere near the ground floor, here are some Day One suggestions to consider:

1. Choose

If you're not intentional about turning on innovation, the status quo will almost always smother it. So the starting point is a deliberate choice to lean into innovation.

This starts with you making a choice for innovation, and then most likely, helping those around you, especially leaders, choose to turn it on. Where do you start?

First, help leaders see the costs and benefits of dialling up repeatable innovation. It's usually not ...