The Corporate Innovation Manifesto

This manifesto is written for companies who have faced stagnant or mediocre performance and are tired of tolerating average activity and aspire to catch up – and pass – competitors who continue to grow and innovate despite economic turmoil. It is written for the executive who yearns for something BIG to happen.

A manifesto for innovation

The waiting game is over. We saw 2008 hit us hard in the bottom line. 2009 left us wondering if we would ever recover while 2010 flowed into 2011 and yet still business is stagnant. Will 2012 be any different? We cannot let it be. We need to take control of our destiny and stop waiting.

Over the past three years we’ve trimmed fat, leaned our operations and pushed our people to do more with less. We’ve done everything we can to survive. But survival is for the weak. We don’t want to survive, we want to thrive – and we will do so by tapping into our most valuable asset: our people.

Our people have seen success and tasted the bitterness of failure. We have learned from mistakes, made some smart decisions and gotten lucky too. We won clients away from the competition and lost them because we failed to serve them accordingly. All of those experiences give us the collective intellect to aggressively begin to think about the future of our company – and our industry.

We have failed to give our employees an incentive to think about the future. We have missed creating a culture where problem solving and idea development is rewarded and appreciated – no longer! Moving forward, we will not tolerate a culture where ideas are random and infrequent. They must instead be the lynchpin to our approach and a common occurrence through all levels of the organization.

We will not allow use “innovation” as a buzzword, but a mantra. Ideas will be the fuel that charges our engine and inspires us to try something new. We will measure results and continually evolve what we do.

We are perfectly capable of outwitting our competition because we’ve hired smart people who want to succeed. We will encourage a community of open communication and dialogue that breaks down barriers between our senior managemnet and the workers in the field.

We will stop penalizing failure, and instead penalize complacency. A failure to act is a far greater sin than an act of failure.

When we fail, we will communicate among our staff and learn from our mistakes. When we succeed, we will shout it from the rooftops and say “do it again!”

We will be agile as a state of mind. If things are taking too long to get complete, we will hold accountable our people for making projects too complicated. Nimble, innovative companies move quickly on everything they do and so we will learn how to break down work into manageable, quicker timelines that allow us to assess priorities and investments (of time and money) more frequently.

We can outmaneuver others in our industry by challenging our people to constantly think about how to be more efficient, identify new opportunities and provide a better product than our competition. We will disrupt ourselves, instead of being disrupted unexpectedly.

We will seek out and eliminate the sacred cows of our business that are holding us back from progress. We will hold these sacred cows up and publicly remove them from our business, even if it costs us in the short-term to do so.

We will stop admiring start-ups and other small businesses who are hacking away at our feet trying to steal market share and start acting like them. We will eliminate complicated decision processes and bureaucracy from our operation so that we can identify, assess and decide on business issues in hours and days, not weeks and months.

We will stop trying to please Wall Street – and instead please our customers. We will start by committing to talk to our customers about what they want from us in the future and learning how we can be more relevant to their needs as they innovate and evolve too.

2012 can be our year to break out and do something big. While our competitors wait, we will plunder their marketshare and create blue oceans of opportunity. We will do so at a pace of a marathon runner, trained for speed, but built for endurance.

And when we are out of ideas and have thought of everything, we will start all over again. Innovation is never finished, because the market will always be changing. And moving forward from now, so will we.