The Leader’s Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills

Powerful Problem-solving Techniques to Ignite Your Team’s Potential

Why You Need to Innovate

Creativity and innovation allow you to:

• Set forth a vision – Inspire and energize your company.
• Construct a culture – Build it on openness and inquiry.
• Devolve power – Share authority with every strata of your organization.
• Establish objectives – Use time frames and metrics to track innovation.
• Come up with numerous ideas – And encourage brainstorming.
• Work with the ideas – Mix, match, deconstruct, reconstruct, vet and choose ideas.
• Check the results – Test the proposals that come from those ideas.
• Act innovatively – Intelligently appraise the results; implement strong new projects.

Successful competitors do not fear change. Companies such as Intel and Gillette try to be the first to change, and pride themselves on discoveries that render their existing products or services obsolete. Although it is wrong to fear change, it is right to be aware that change and innovation are not synonymous. Innovation creates something fundamentally new.