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Leading innovation
In the VUCA world, organisations attempt to track down various ways of acquiring competitive advantage. One of
these possibilities is the introduction of innovation.
Technological advancements, changes in shoppers' conduct, expanded competition, restricted resources and short
life cycles of product and services are only a portion of the variables that make the requirement for innovations in
organisations. While a few organisations decide to improve to stick out or rather innovate to survive.
Others are compelled to innovate to endure. By and large innovation in different areas of an organisation's activity,
further develops usefulness, effectiveness and nature of work. Consequently, expanding the nature of products and
services and their competitiveness and working on the general proficiency and efficiency of the organisation.
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A new report reasoned that in excess of 70% of the senior leaders say that innovation will be no less than one of the
main three drivers of development for their organisation in the following three to five years.
Different leaders consider innovation to be the main way for them to speed up the progress in today's global
business environment. Re-emphasising the point people are organisation's most significant asset, they create and
develop and their disposition to innovation is the most significant.
The leaders assume a significant part in moulding innovation perspective in the organisations that's why and they
ought to be open to ground-breaking thoughts and initiatives from people. They should uphold it as opposed to
subverting it.
Furthermore, leaders should believe their people by establishing an agreeable workplace dependent on
collaboration, dedication and trust. Employees should know as well about their real effect on innovation processes in
organisation.
The more leaders comprehend and understand the embodiment and nature of innovation themselves, the simpler it
would be for them to make their people get ready and be persuaded about the idea of innovation. It is interesting to
note that how leaders invigorate their workers speaks with them and make the conditions for them to make a move,
that is either by spurring them, laid out objectives clearly or by giving them independence would either work with or
repress the capacity and eagerness of people to make and carry out innovation.
Numerous analysts and researchers have recommended that the most ideal way of animating innovation within an
organisation is to advance the imagination and development of its members. Leadership, which adds to establishing
a climate of transparency for people can fundamentally advance an association's innovativeness.
Some researchers uses a leadership theory based on two fundamentally different types of leadership behaviour that
is transactional leadership and transformational leadership to assess the impact of leadership on an organisation's
innovation.
The transformational and transactional leadership is probably best known in the field of leadership as the two most
popular theories and the theories that best explain the style of leadership are often viewed rather as opposing or
competing approaches.
Transactional leadership on one hand does not inspire internal motivation. It suits more of Type A people or Type
A employees, as opposed to transformational leadership, which is more suitable for Type Y employees, as it
stimulates employees to generate and implement innovations.
Transformational leaders benefit from the inspirational motivation and intellectual stimulation, which are critical
factors for innovation. Similarly, Jung's research shows that transformational leadership is significantly and positively
linked to organisational innovation capabilities.
In addition, its impact on the organisation's readiness to innovate and on the market success of innovation was
confirmed.
In the three box solution, Vijay Govindarajan adopts an ancient Hindu philosophy to balance a company's often
competing realities of past present and future. He says that more we can plan for opportunity, the better the
possibility of innovating and creating a successful future.
This model, the three box solution, is a simple framework that recognises the three competing challenges leaders
face when leading innovation. It's a powerful guide, although for aligning organisation and teams on the critical, but
competing activities required to simultaneously create a new business while optimising the current one.
In the three boxes, companies must do the following. Box one, they need to manage the present core business at
peak efficiently and profitably. As per box two, the organisations need to escape the traps of the past by identifying
and divesting businesses and abandoning practices, ideas and attitudes that have lost relevance in a changed
environment or that have, in other words, have become redundant.
As for box three, the organisations need to generate breakthrough ideas and convert them into new products and
services. Let us now try to understand this three box framework in much more detail.

The success for organisations according to the three box framework requires a different set of skills, attitude,
practices and leadership in each box. As you can see in box one, the strategy of an organisation can be to run core
businesses at peak efficiency and use linear innovations with an existing business model without experimenting
much to extend brands and or to improve product offerings.
However, one challenge that they can face is to keep focusing on near-term customer needs and optimise
operations for high efficiency against lower reasonable cost. They may also face the challenge for reducing variance
from plan and align rewards and intense incentives with strategy.
The leadership behaviour, which can help organisations see through this particular phase is to set challenging goals
for peak performance, analyse data to quickly spot and address exceptions and inefficiencies and create a culture of
doing everything smarter, faster and cheaper.
The box two is about ability to build the future day by day to create space and supporting structures for new non-
linear ideas and let go of the past practices, habits, activities and attitudes which have now become redundant. So
the challenge in this stage can be is that past always fights back.
So the organisations needs to be prepared to make tough calls about values. So leaders can help organisations in this
stage by establishing formal planned opportunities that is gathering analysing weak signals, championing the ideas of
maverick thinkers, promoting people and appreciating unique ideas, people with breakthrough ideas. The leaders
should not tolerate obstructionism.
They should set an example for the enterprise by visibly and publicly penalising foot draggers and dissipate the need
for an ordinary and orderly process of for experimentation. In a nutshell, the discipline becomes very important
when organisations are trying to do with redundancies and are trying to embrace the new developments that they
are planning for themselves and trying to innovate and put themselves in the map of future.
It's the responsibility of the leaders particularly to set an example and develop a culture of discipline wherein people
having right ideas, creative thought processes and problem solutions with them needs to be appreciated and
recognised, whereas they need to set an example wherein foot draggers are reinforced negatively and such kind of
behaviours are not tolerated at all.
Box three talks about the non-linear future, which is built mainly by experimentation, that tests assumptions and
dissolves uncertainties. Hedging risk, new learning either strengthens an idea or reveals its weaknesses. So the box
three is all about non-linear future. It's about making well calculated calls, decision calls into the future.
It may so happen that the market may pose a particular opportunity that organisations may want to embrace, but
since they can well be the first movers in that particular field of business, the uncertainties are high.
The organisation may not know that whether they would succeed or not and that is why the challenge can be to
hedge their risk and at the same time, the people capabilities which are required to pursue that particular business
potential is something that organisations needs to align well.
Now there are a lot of unique market opportunities which require unique people capacities and capabilities at the
same time and such people capabilities are anyways scarce in the market in the labour market.
That is why organisations, the challenge that lies ahead in in front of leader is to develop those kind of unique people
capabilities and capacities within the organisation, so that whenever an organisation sees into these kind of
opportunities or they venture into an already existing foray of business, which is new or different from their existing
business, you know they are well equipped to you know, take care of the challenges and opportunity that that such
scenarios throws back at them.
So the leaders in box three, the focus should not be on revenue development, but on the quality and pace of
learning from experiments. Since many non-linear ideas may launch into you know embryonic markets, it is
important to test assumptions not only about the product, but also the business model at the developing market.
When we look at several entrepreneurial ventures in India particularly, we would find that lot of organisations like
Uber or Swiggy or Ola or the very recent one on in the tech at tech space. Now they have foreign opportunities
which were never explored before and although these organisations were young start-ups, very which were not,
which were not very big in terms of people, size or other resources for that matter.
But they were quick to grab the opportunity, quick to identify the opportunities, they were willing to take that risk.
They however, they didn't know whether they would succeed or not, but they were willing to take that risk and they
aligned themselves well with the people capabilities and the other resource requirement that that they would have
needed to make most of the potential opportunities that they saw at that time.
So these three box frameworks is actually you know doing away with the past slowly, doing away with all the
redundancies as and when the time comes.
You know being very profitable and efficient and effective in what you're doing at present in terms of organisational
perspective that they should do good in what they are doing and at the same time preparing oneself for the future
set of opportunities that may lie ahead of the organisation and make sure that they have the right set of people
capabilities and other resource requirement, as and when they could seize those market opportunities.
Now let us look at some of the important traits of innovative leaders. The first and foremost trait can be to inspire
and motivate others. Extraordinary leaders create a vision of the future, a vision that is striking and convincing. That
is inspiring enough for people to need to accomplish it.
Everybody needs to work for an organisation that has an effect on the planet. People often speak about the triple
bottom line, which is the impact that an organisation make on the people, planet and profit. As a leader, you are
best ready to help the colleague how they deal with the effect it has on clients and society.
Societal impact is of paramount value these days for leaders as well as organisations. The second key characteristic
of an innovative leader is to display high integrity and honesty. We have already discussed the importance of ethical
leadership in organisations and that holds true for all kinds of leaders. Successful leaders, in fact, are honest,
transparent, have high trustworthiness.
They do what they say, they will do and they walk the talk. They know what they are discussing and they have all the
intention to take those discussions forward and implement their plans. As Ray Davis, CEO of the then leading banks
said in his book titled Leading Through Uncertainty, and I quote: I always tell our people that they are entitled to get
answers to every question they have.
That doesn't mean they are going to like the answers, but it's going to be truthful and I know they can deal with the
truth. This might create additional questions, but we'll get through them and we do. Unquote.

Another important characteristic of leaders is to solve problems and analyse issues. Leaders are selected, prepared
and are picked to essentially tackle hierarchical issues and to make the most of chances in the marketplace, the
opportunities that the business environment throws at them.
Now this requires fantastic insightful capacities, intellectual capabilities, as well as better than expected relationship
building abilities, the ability to gel well with people to create a conducive and an environment where team
relationship and cohesiveness thrives.
Drive for results has always been a key characteristic of leaders and for innovative leaders the story is no different.
Certain individuals are glad to pause for a minute and watch the world pass by, while others just can't resist or afford
it, except if they are getting things going in their favour or in the favour of their organisation.
We have seen a lot of organisation taking that pause and being pushed out of the market. Kodak is one such
example. Extraordinary leaders have a more elevated level of determination, mindfulness and drive than any other
person in the organisation and that they can be dependent on to achieve objectives for the very same reason.
The fifth key characteristic of a leader is to communicate powerfully and prolifically. Now innovative leaders within
an organisations use different platforms to communicate powerfully within the team. They use the social media
platforms, the closed group communication on social media like the Facebook, the chatter, they use various other

platforms and then, typically in these days, the pandemic and the pre-pandemic, post pandemic era, where teams
are scattered all over the globe geographically, communication has played a vital role in bringing people together.
Communicate, exchange, interchange ideas and the leader is interested with the responsibility to make most of this
opportunity using technological advancements and using digital technologies, to enhance the communication and
make it more effective and appealing.
Building relationship is another desirable trait that is expected from the leader. It's about people relationship making
most of the capabilities and the capacities that people have, respecting the diverse background and the unique value
proposition that people bring onto the table.
It's not just about the internal stakeholders that a leader must create good relationship with, rather it's the vendors,
the suppliers, the consumers, which are playing an effective role in the growth of the organisation.
I would like to cite an example of an MNC and when the new CEO joined that MNC, you know he looked at the
various charts and the revenue growth journey of the organisation, and he observed a certain dip which is continuing
for that organisation, a certain dip in the revenue generation and while he tried to understand as to why that dip in
revenue generation is happening, he zeroed down onto the fact that the customer responsiveness of the
organisation was not doing great.
The vendors are not happy, their queries were not answered smoothly. There is an information gap. Now the CEO
decided to train a large base of the employee close to 15,000 in India itself to train the employees on customer
sensitivity and how to build relationship with vendors and consumers.
Building on to that observation, the CEO decided to train 15,000 of its employee in the India region itself on
customer sensitivity and building relationship with vendors, such as the length and breadth of building relationship
and the emphasis that can be laid on building relationship to achieve organisational objectives.

Display technical or professional expertise can be another key characteristics that innovative leaders can have. We
all know that at the beginning of one's career, technical and professional expertise do matter a lot, but at the same
time it's been concluded that, as one climb the ladders of hierarchies in the organisation, people skills and
conceptual skills start playing a bigger role.
Because then, the leader is expected to plan and set vision for the organisation and take care of the people related
challenges. However, in the VUCA world and given the technological advancements and frequent changes in the
business model, the leader of modern age are expected to keep themselves abreast with all of these changes and
developments that are happening. Now, the benefit can be two-fold.
One, it helps leaders to set the future vision for the organisation as then only he would come to know as to what
kind of opportunities lies in the business environment.
The second is, the leader can thus know that what kind of people capability gaps exist in the organisation vis-a-vis
you know when he looks at the opportunities lying in the market and then appropriate course correction can happen
or the deployment and training and development actions can come into play to bridge that gap.
Displaying a strategic perspective is one more characteristic that innovative leaders should display. Now great
leaders have a long term vision of the future and they avoid getting bogged down in the here and now. While leader
can be tactical when necessary, they maintain the strategic outlook necessary to guide their businesses to the best
future possible.

Develop others is something that we all expect from our great leaders to do and it is about developing the talent and
potential of people within the organisation. Identifying high potential employees, which is HIPO as popularly known,
is something which is which is quite popular and relevant in the organisations and leaders must deploy mechanisms
and processes to make sure that the potential within the organisation get developed into real talent.
Innovates is obviously one of the quality that innovative leader must have. In fact, according to the General Electrics,
GE's 1212 Global Innovation Parameter, which polls 2800 senior executives on the state of innovation around the
world. 92% of respondents agreed with the statement that innovation is the main lever to create a more competitive
economy. The ability to innovate thus is a key skill for every great leader.
Now let us look at one of the example, the Henry Ford example to see as to how a strategic vision that can inspire
the people and what wonders and can do for the organisation. Now Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor as we all
know, had a vision in 1903 and I quote his vision.

He said: I will build motor car for the multitude. It shall be large enough for the family, but small enough for the
unskilled individual to operate easily and care for, and it shall be light in weight and it may be economical in
maintenance.
It will be built of honest materials by the best workmen that money can hire, after the simplest design that modern
engineering can devise. But it shall be so low in price that the man of moderate means may own one and enjoy with
his family the blessings of happy hours spent in God's great open spaces. Unquote.
Henry Ford was named as 'Businessman of the 20th century' in November 1999 by Fortune magazine. He was
honoured for transforming the lives of billions of people and revolutionising the automobile industry by creating a
car which was affordable to the common working middle class, as he said in his vision statement.
In his revolution, Ford Motor Company established themselves as both a manufacturer as well as an industry leader.
It was Henry Ford's vision to provide people with mobility that changed the lives of millions.

Ford had formulated a philosophy of three P's: people, products and profit for his company.
He believed that his cars should make a reasonable profit, but not too much. Now, these three p's are very similar to
the triple bottom line that we speak of these days. People, planet, profit.
According to Henry Ford, it was better to sell a large number of cars at a reasonably small profit, because it would
enable a larger number of people to enjoy the use of a car and because it gives a larger number of people
employment at good wages such was his vision. He was able to deliver his vision through his innovative mind-set and
endurance to take risk in this regard.
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