Archive for April 16th, 2008
Innovator’s Dilemmas: bold vs. credible?
“Set bold targets. ‘No company outperforms its aspirations,’ (…) ‘The beliefs of your employees set the upper limit on what’s possible. If your expectation for top-line growth is pinned to the industry average,’ you’ll get average performance. If you set ‘unreasonable growth targets,’ you’ll make strides you never thought possible.”
Read Cord Cooper’s article, “Time to set bold targets“, on Money Magazine. Originally published in the April 16, 2008 version of Investor’s Business Daily
This is a two edged sword, bold and unreasonable targets can either excite or undermine the project’s credibility before employees and investors.
It should be noted that innovation is not just about bold targets and hypergrowth. In actuality, being able to innovate is often a requirement to stay in business when our markets happen to be shifting gears more often and rapidly than ever before.
While many existing processes and practices work well for known markets and products, forecasting revenues and costs involving emerging technologies, products and services can require as much ingenuity and creativity as the product’s own engineering, not to mention the need for business model innovation while crafting a market creation strategy that supports the business case.
In theory, most corporations would go over target setting by leveraging market data that decision makers can rely on. Books such as “Competing on Analytics” would support that point. Yet, some modeling work is based on logical fallacies, volatile trends and changing assumptions which result in underestimating risks and over-committing resources, features and delivery schedules. So, the quality of the business case and the management skills of of the reviewers and decision makers matter.
It takes visionary leadership and persuasive communication skills to push for higher performance levels and unconventional ways of thinking driving a company’s success. Just bold target setting is not enough.
Picture credits: “Digital image content © 1997-2007 Hemera Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Jupiter Images Corporation. All Rights Reserved”
| J. de Francisco |  |
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| Chicago, 16 April 08 |  |
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