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.
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