Nano Tools for Leaders XXIX

Visionary Leadership: Creating Scenes That Change the Future

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Greg Shea, Adjunct Professor of Management, Faculty Associate, Center for Leadership and Change Management, The Wharton School; and Cassie Solomon, President and Founder, The New Group Consulting, Inc.

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The Goal:

Ensure your next change initiative is a success by envisioning the behaviors needed to implement it.

Nano Tool:

Leading successful change initiatives is an essential skill in today’s “perpetual whitewater” business environment. Yet nine studies done between 1994 and 2010 report that 50 to 75 percent of all change initiatives fail. Behind such failures you’ll often find a missing ingredient — one that may seem obvious in retrospect, but that many change leaders overlook — a clear, specific vision of the desired end-state.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXVIII

More and Better Innovation Through Outside Communities

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Ethan Mollick, PhD, The Edward B. and Shirley R. Shils Assistant Professor of Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

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The Goal:

Harness key sources of innovation outside your company.

Nano Tool:

Joy’s Law, named after Sun Microsystem’s founder Bill Joy, states that “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for somebody else.” Research on the sources of innovation has proven Joy’s Law correct. Many of the ideas and innovations that lead to breakthrough products and services start outside of companies, among users of products and informal communities of amateurs. In fields ranging from scientific instruments to commercial banking, from semiconductor manufacturing processes to plastic extrusion, researchers have found that key innovations were developed by users, not manufacturers.