The High-Potential Leader

4Be a Master of Big Ideas and Execution

If you’re a hipo, you’re naturally inclined to look at the organization from the outside in. Like most of your fellow millennials, you live on the Internet, message boards, websites, and social networks. What differentiates you from your age-mates is that you’re able to use that information to come up with ideas that could create a new market, a new competitive advantage, a new game, or even change the world. The ability to satisfy your curiosity twenty-four hours a day with total access to information is a great spur to creativity, but your ideas must be actionable. To see your vision come to life, you have to be disciplined in shaping the ideas, deciding which ones to pursue, and converting them into specific actions so they can be executed in a way that delivers results. True hipos can do both: come up with big ideas and get them executed.

Make Your Big Ideas Better

The transparency and democratization that are creeping into the workplace are a gift to hipos who have big ideas and want to be heard. Senior leaders at many legacy companies are realizing that you don’t need decades of experience and high organizational status to generate great ideas. Long tenure can in fact be a detriment when it comes to conceiving something radically new. They’ve begun to search for ideas for growth and transformation across the organization, by soliciting e-mails addressed to them personally from anyone in the company, setting up intracompany discussion ...