Leadership in the Headlines

Chapter 3

Making

Innovation, production and marketing are the core of what companies do. When companies say they ‘make’ something, the product is the combination of all three of these elements, and leaders that starve innovation, bungle production or misdirect marketing will not last long.

Theories about how to encourage innovation are confused and the practice of innovation is riven with contradictions. Invention is often mistaken for innovation. Innovation is assumed to apply only to technology, or to hardware, when the greatest innovations – think of the idea of management itself – are often new ways of doing business. Critically, innovation is misperceived as being exclusively about the production of something entirely novel. Yet it ...