PBTO48: Your Organisation’s Culture is Your Last Competitive (Invisible) Advantage with Soren Kaplan

Who is on the show: In this episode we host, Soren Kaplan. Soren is the bestselling and award-winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an Affiliated Professor at the Center for Effective Organisations at USC’s Marshall School of Business, a writer for FastCompany, a globally recognised keynote speaker, and the Founder of InnovationPoint, an innovation consulting company. Why is he on the show: His Wall Street Journal bestseller, Leapfrogging, was recognised as “Best General Business Book” by the International Book Awards and “Best Leadership Book” by the Axiom Book Awards. He is a sought after keynote speaker and is part of the Thinkers50 think-tank, which […]

Building a Culture of Innovation by Creating A Structure for Unstructured Innovation

The need for innovation has never been more acute for businesses than it is today. Every CEO of any sizable business is worrying about which startup from which garage is going to change the rules of their game and disrupt them. They are looking for ways to find (internally, within their organisation or externally, through acquisition/partnership/investments) innovations that can give them enough breathing space to grow their businesses and give their shareholders a good return on investment (and in the process make a lot of money for themselves :-)) However, what most organisations don’t get is that there is only one […]

How To Build Organizational Culture

Recently, I was moderating a design thinking workshop and talking about how it is critical to foster a culture of innovation within the organization and that it is responsibility of the leaders to build & nurture this culture. Some one stopped me and asked the following question: ” As a leader, what can i do to build the culture that i want for my team or organization”. For a moment, i was lost for the right words. I then took a pause and collected my thoughts and responded such: Building a culture is like gardening. Irrespective of what you do […]

Innovation Isn’t an Idea Problem, Nor is it a Recognition Problem

In a recent HBR article with the same title, David Burrus argued that Innovation is a recognition problem. He also went on to propose a solution to this problem, one that Rhode Island based Rite-Solutions is already using. The general idea is that people are given a certain fixed amount of virtual currencies (say 10000$) which they can invest in any of the idea that is proposed on their internal idea site. This could eliminate the bias of any one or a set of executives, who are usually responsible for deciding on the feasibility of any particular idea. In my […]