7 minute read
Are You Taking Steps To Invite Innovation Into Your Company?
By BOB GRAHAM, CEO of Breakthrough Solutions
The future viability of your business will increasingly lie in its ability to be innovative. Most business leaders say they want to be innovative; it’s been a buzzword in MBA programs for decades. To many, being innovative suggests finding the magic recipe that will make things easier, most cost-effective, and more efficient.
Here’s the thing: Most of the innovations we might consider big stand on the shoulders of the many smaller improvements that don’t always get recognized as innovative. To land the first Apollo spaceship on the moon, NASA learned valuable lessons from its Mercury and Gemini programs and the Russian Sputnik program.
Your company’s success will increasingly be connected to your ability to consider and adopt new approaches.
In the 1870s, Winfield Scott Gerrish saw the challenges resulting from the standard practice of using rivers to move logs in Michigan. After seeing a steam locomotive at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, he built a seven-mile-long logging railroad that used a steam engine on steel rails for the first time. Others had used steam engines and wood rails to transport logs, but never with a steam locomotive and steel rails, according to Carl Jay Bajema’s historical research. Gerrish’s innovation enabled year-round transportation of logs of any size.
Looking more closely, a significant innovation attributed to Gerrish was little more than a logical next step. Rail lines were in use, steam engines were viable, and steel rails were available. Gerri’s just put them together to create something new.
Finding those next steps can be a struggle. Through the coaching and consulting work I do with leaders in various industries, including the lumber industry, I see the need for leaders to shift their thinking. To invite innovation into their companies, they need to ask these three questions whenever their company tries anything.
WHAT WENT WELL?
WHAT DIDN’T GO AS PLANNED?
WHAT COULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?
The power of these questions is amazing. I have uncovered great lessons from seemingly colossal failures by answering these questions. They force us to move past results to the process, the ideas, and the strategies we thought would achieve the intended result. I have found no other way to elicit this make-or-break information that fuels true innovation.
LEADERS ALSO MUST ADOPT WHAT I CALL AN INNOVATOR’S MINDSET.
Here are three steps to take to cultivate a climate that invites innovation. First, leaders need to welcome change. When they want to say “we always have done it this way” or “because it works,” they need to step back and contemplate the full range of options more closely.
Second, leaders need to look outside the usual challenges. Gerrish looked at the challenges of logging with an innovator’s mindset. He recognized a challenge or limitation: moving logs on Michigan rivers when they froze.
Rather than say, “Oh, well,” Gerrish looked for a solution. He found something outside his knowledge, experience, and perspective. He blended that with his existing knowledge, experience, and
perspective to create a new solution. In the end, Gerrish stacked the next block on a tower of innovations in transportation and logging.
We each have the same capabilities if we invite that innovator’s mind. Solutions are usually right in front of our eyes – if we look and listen for them. My wife, friends, news stories, comments at trade shows and conventions, the success of other businesses all provide me with new knowledge, experiences, and perspectives that can help me solve problems.
Third, an innovator doesn’t just accept mistakes; they encourage – yes, encourage – mistakes, recognizing that no leap forward can occur without a few missteps. The best baseball players fail seven in 10 times at bat, yet if you hit .300 over many years, you could find a place in the Hall of Fame.
Innovators celebrate mistakes, for they are the materials on which those building blocks toward innovation are built.
Leaders must put actions behind their words. They can’t yell or complain when things go wrong (and they will, often). Instead, innovators need to take on the role of mentor. They need to help employees to feel safe to scrutinize what happened. Recognizing where something went astray is the first step toward overcoming it. Innovative leaders also counsel their employees toward uncovering the hidden truths – those buried gems – that can come from a new understanding of a situation or action using those three questions. Successful innovators are constantly answering these three questions to develop that new understanding. Finding those answers isn’t always easy or fun, but the juice is truly worth the squeeze.
At jobs early in my career, mistakes were the source of ridicule. Bosses yelled, employees got scared for their job – and importantly, they stopped taking chances or even suggesting changes for fear that they might be setting themselves up for more criticism or being fired.
Younger workers won’t tolerate that approach; they want their bosses to be mentors, not managers. And since more than half of the workforce is now millennials or Generation Z, successful companies will learn to embrace this approach.
For companies that have eschewed innovation, now may be a great time to dip their feet in the water. Increasing your reliance on technology (which has far less downtime than humans), trying new sales strategies (an updated, mobile-friendly website; using social media; and putting prices in emails), or perhaps exploring how companies in similar situations (the lumber industry isn’t unique!) are succeeding can open the door to innovation in your company.
A BONUS TIP: Lumber industry veterans tend to offer the biggest roadblocks to innovation. At every NHLA convention I have attended, every NHLA workshop I conducted, and every happy hour with lumber industry leaders, someone barked, “Things will be better once they get back to the way they were.”
They are too quick to blame the pandemic, politics, global issues, supply chains, “them,” you name it. The source of their problems is always external.
True innovation comes from looking inside. It comes from not looking backward but forward. It comes from being willing to adopt the innovator’s mindset and make mistakes on your company’s pathway to success.
Over time, the companies that will survive and thrive in the lumber industry will be those that adopt an eye and ear toward trying new things, which may spark an innovation. In the end, they have no choice.
Bob Graham, CEO of Breakthrough Solutions, is a co-founder of the Renegade Success Network (RenegadeSuccessNetwork.com). The network provides leaders and small business owners with guidance, resources, and support to carve their own unique pathway to success. He can be reached at bgraham@BreakthroughSolutions.co.
BE PART OF BUILDING SOMETHING BIG
Where We’ve Been
It’s no secret, the hardwood industry has been losing market share to products that look like wood, but have none of the natural benefits or authentic attributes of Real American Hardwood™ products. In order to recapture market share and improve industry stability, hardwood organizations united to form the Real American Hardwood Coalition.
Where We Are
The goal is to develop a national consumer promotion campaign on a scale that’s never been seen before. And a lot has been accomplished in a short period of time—including the completion of an extensive consumer research initiative, establishing brand guidelines, registering trademarks, and launching social media profiles.
Where We’re Going, Together
The next steps will have the largest impact on the industry and require buy-in from all industry stakeholders. The Coalition is preparing to launch a comprehensive promotion campaign—including a consumer-oriented website, in-store promotion at top big box stores, a broad media relations campaign, social media influencer partnerships, print and web advertising, and much more.
How You Can Get Involved
Moving the campaign forward and expanding its reach will take the support of the entire industry—for the benefit of the entire industry.
■ Make a voluntary contribution to help fund the consumer
promotion campaign.
■ Use the Real American Hardwood logo on your sales and marketing
communications, facilities and vehicles, products, and website.
■ Follow @RealAmericanHardwood on Instagram and Facebook, and tag #RealAmericanHardwood in your social media posts.
