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1-Page Summary of Lateral Thinking
Why You Need to Innovate
Creativity and innovation can inspire an organization. It allows you to set forth a vision, build a culture of openness and inquiry, share authority with every strata in the company, establish objectives with time frames and metrics for tracking innovation, encourage brainstorming for coming up with numerous ideas.
Work with ideas – Mix and match them, deconstruct and reconstruct them, vet and choose the best ones.
Test the results – Check out the new ideas. * Act innovatively – Implement strong projects based on those ideas.
Companies that are successful don’t fear change. They try to be the first ones to come up with a new idea and pride themselves on being able to make something better than what they currently have. Although it’s wrong to fear change, it is right for companies not to confuse innovation and change because they’re two different things. Innovation creates something completely new, while changing an existing product or service makes them better in some way.
How to Recognize the Lateral Leader
Lateral thinking is a way of approaching problems by changing the angle from which you approach them. Lateral leaders are those who lead from beside, not in front, and they inspire rather than direct. They also change the rules or people around them instead of relying on what’s familiar. These kinds of leaders view their staff as partners and teammates rather than chattel (property). They ask for advice, information and opinions to solve problems better.
- In order to build successful teams, you need to hire entrepreneurs instead of managers.
The Test of Innovation
The progress of innovation is measurable. It’s evident when everyone in the company knows what the big goals are and how the organization is moving toward them. Your organizational culture encourages people to generate and test original ideas, which leads to brainstorming sessions that occur regularly. Training emphasizes creativity, so people garner praise for being innovative. You make use of other people’s good ideas no matter where you see them, whether it’s within your department or another one. Interdepartmental teams address well-defined problems by working together on solutions through collaboration with others from different departments.
Problem solving begins with generating lots of ideas, prototyping them, and piloting to see if they’re feasible. People facing problems can look at other departments’ solutions for inspiration.
A death squad identifies outdated products or processes and eliminates them. Innovation goals are clear, and the company’s culture is not afraid to eliminate things that have been around for a long time.
People commonly take risks and try new things. The boss’s ideas are just as good as anyone else’s, but not necessarily better.
A company’s budget is a discipline, but it isn’t a killer. If an idea is good, the company will find the money to support it.
The Underpinnings of Transformation
The lateral leader is a person who provides insight into why change happens. The lateral leader explains the reasons for change with four cardinal supports: values, reason, culture and mission. Values are principles of an organization. A mission is its strategic objective; it defines what the organization does and how it will do it. Culture is an organization’s style or way of doing things. To create vision, leaders must communicate their ideas by any means possible because people need to know about them in order to understand why they’re changing. Google uses an intranet while Shell has an e-mail suggestion box where employees can submit ideas that can help improve overall organizational efficiency
