7 Practices to Grow a Culture of Innovation

by: Bob Morris

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Innovators working on solving problems and coming up with creative solutions rely on crafting the right questions. Leaders who are helping others to grow and innovate are always trying to craft the best questions to make a difference.

In The Pause Principle:  Step Back to Lead Forward, Kevin Cashman identifies and discusses Seven Practices to Grow a Culture of Innovation(Pages 128-129) that will not only help your team grow, but will force them to own their unique learning experiences.

Here they are:

1. Be on-Purpose: Take the time to clarify your motivating values and compelling purpose, individually and collectively. Purpose fuels energy and drive to go beyond what us, and it continues until something extraordinary has been created.

2. Question and Listen: Step back to be open and curious by using the language of innovation: questioning and listening. Strive to ask the extra question to challenge yourself and others to go deeper and stretch further.

3. Risk Experimentation: Have the courage to accelerate through failure by building momentum and speed through new learning. Experimentation steers us to our eventual destination through its roadblocks, twists, and turns, as long as we are learning agile and creative enough to persist.

4. Reflect and Synthesize: Set aside time, in the manner that works for you, for integration and synthesis of ideas, options, concerns, and initiatives. Identify your best way to daily or weekly “cut through all the clutter” to gain clarity and reveal new possibilities.

5. Consider Inside-Out and Outside-In Dynamics: Step back to consider the forces shaping the future by looking at both internal and external cues. Foster optimal creativity internally and consider competitive, global, and futuristic dynamics in an integrated manner.

6. Foster Generativity: Take the time to connect, coach, mentor, and develop your people. Constructively challenge their thinking, strategy, and behavior through the lens of innovation…Grow your people to grow a culture of innovation.

7. Be Authentic: The innovation potential of your teams or organization will be directly proportional to your innovation embodiment. Make sure your behaviors are not unknowingly limiting a culture of innovation.

Read a review of  The Pause Principle.

Read more from Bob here.

Tags: Bob Morris, Innovation, Leadership Development, Leadership Engine

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Communicating Effectively

by: Bob Morris

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Note from the Vision Room Curator: If you think church leaders don’t need to know about advertising, please rethink that position. Read the quotes below with the church, your target audience, and yourself substituted where appropriate.

Decades ago, I read Ogilvy on Advertising and then more recently Ken Roman’s biography,The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising. I highly recommend both.

Here are ten memorable Ogilvy quotations that are relevant to any efforts to communicate effectively.

1. “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife.”

2. “The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”

3. “Don’t bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.”

4. “I have a theory that the best ads come from personal experience. Some of the good ones I have done have really come out of the real experience of my life, and somehow this has come over as true and valid and persuasive.”

5. “I don’t know the rules of grammar… If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”

6. “Good copy can’t be written with tongue in cheek, written just for a living. You’ve got to believe in the product.”

7. “If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don’t let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else’s advertising.”

8. “First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it.”

9. “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

10. “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar. “

Read more from Bob here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Bob Morris, David Ogilvy

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