Try A Revolutionary Idea

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Ronald T. Brown, Ph.D.

In his book, “Leading the Revolution,” Gary Hamel notes there are two kinds of leaders: 1) “Value Squeezers” – who try to milk additional profits out of existing ways of doing things, and 2) “Revolutionaries” – who continually enable the flow of new ideas to maintain a competitive advantage. 

Hamel believes strategic leaders are revolutionaries who champion continuous improvement by creating organizations that operate by the following rules

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1) Set Unreasonable Expectations – This notion is consistent with Collins & Porras’s book “Built to Last” which found that perpetually successful companies set “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAG’s)” that stretch people to do more than they thought possible.

2) Maintain An Elastic Business Definition – Don’t get locked into one view of who you are as a company.  If Canon had always thought of itself as a “camera company,” it may never have invented the laser jet printer.

3) Create A Cause, Not A Business – Create energy by defining an engaging purpose for your company that goes beyond mere profits.

4) Listen To Revolutionary Voices – Many companies are led by people who want more and more of the same, and thus they tend to be unsympathetic to revolutionary voices within their organization.  Yet those voices may well be the ones that will enable a company to keep its competative edge into the future.

5) Create An Open Culture For Ideas – If an organization does not systematically solicit (and reward) new ideas, they will die.

6) Create An Open Pipeline For Capital – Let managers invest freely in ideas they believe will better serve the needs of customers.

7) Create An Open Market For Talent – Attracting, and then keeping, talent is a key strategic opportunity for many organizations.

8) Encourage Low-Risk Experiments – Enable people to conduct small experiments to grow revolutionary ideas.

9) Grow By Cellular division – When these little experiments succeed, don’t stifle them by bureaucratizing them.  Spin off small, elastic departments that are free to quickly bring a promising idea into reality.

10) Share The Wealth – Hamel wrote, “You can’t reward entrepreneurs like you reward stewards.”  If a revolutionary comes up with a great idea, he or she naturally wants to enjoy in the benefits of that idea.