How to Overcome Innovation Challenges Like the Best of Amazon

Have you noticed the amount of change in the tools available to management over the last decade? We are talking about the tools managers use to influence human effort. And tools that help us overcome innovation challenges.

The goal of driving this change is to continue to improve productivity. But there are new challenges confronting today’s managers. These are challenges that cannot be solved with new management technology or tools.

While some of the most exciting possibilities of social networks are most likely in the future, there is a myriad of companies that benefit from social networks today.

Amazon.com differentiates itself not as an online store, but as a social network.  Their interface, product line, and customer relationship management, while strong, are easily replicated.  What makes the site a standout is the customer reviews and suggestions.

An overriding challenge for most of today’s businesses is how to adapt, change, and innovate continuously and at a more rapid rate. Yet in most of the businesses we work with and study, business leadership favors the status quo, change, renewal, and innovation.

It is not hard to spot entire industries such as pharmaceuticals, advertising, and banking, where the incumbents are struggling to invent their way out of dying business models.

The barriers from digital disruption, hyper-competition, and change are coming down at a rapid pace. In this environment, the returns on incrementalism are heading down while the premium on innovation and change is rapidly increasing.

Business innovation and change are mostly afterthoughts, aren’t they? They are definitely not activities that involve most managers even infrequently.

Let’s examine some of the detailed challenges of business innovation and change:

Employee engagement

The biggest management challenge faced today? Employee engagement, hands down. Global surveys show that fewer than 20% of employees are highly engaged in their work. That says people are just not committed emotionally or intellectually to what they do on the job.

In jobs where businesses need the intellectual capital for innovation and change, this lack of engagement is competitively untenable. A huge management challenge.

Process, not tools

Tools and technology for innovation are everywhere and the list is growing every day. They can help, but the real challenge is to build an innovation process that works for your team. And created and supported by the team.

Natural leadership

The challenge of a natural leader is one that requires implementing a culture of participation. It is not necessarily the type of culture built into most of today’s businesses. But it’s key to remember that executives, managers and front line employees alike seldom have trouble spotting emerging innovations.

More often, troubles surround their ability to successfully communicate these opportunities and challenges to upper management and obtain the organizational buy-in needed to quickly and concisely respond.  

As a business leader, it’s important to think of innovation and change management as an ongoing, not occasional, activity.  Organization-wide, you need to open yourself up to the possibility of change.  

Changing values and attitudes

Have you noticed the differences in the values and attitudes of today’s millennials? Lots of changes coming. The millennials now entering the workforce in large numbers will compel businesses to retool their legacy management practices.

Their attitudes and values will help democratize the work environment and incent everyone to help create a strategy and offer inputs on critical issues. It won’t happen overnight, but with new management practices, it will happen.

Uncertainty

All of us and especially business leaders find great discomfort in uncertainty. Because of global debt and economic struggles, uncertainty is more pronounced today than in the past. The sad news is that uncertainty leads to a short-term focus. Due to uncertainty, companies tend to shy away from long-term planning in favor of shorter-term goals.

While this might feel right, a failure to strategically plan five to ten years into the future can end up destroying value. Businesses must learn to balance the need for a more reactive, short-term focus with the need for informed, long-term strategies.

Reluctant to take risk

Decision-makers need to make decisions, even if they don’t have perfect information. Even the most successful organizations and managers in the world are never 100 percent sure how outcomes will play out — and sometimes, they’re even aware that first attempts may well be disastrous.

As Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz famously stated, “No good plan survives the first contact with the enemy.” In other words, the second that you hit the battlefield, every variable can change. So to succeed, you need to be prepared to meet those potential changes and respond in kind.

To this extent, you need to experiment, prototype, gain hands-on learning and — whether speaking from an organizational or personal level — constantly be striving to acquire the experience, skills, contacts, insights, and connections that will help diversify and strengthen your outlook.  

Competition

Managers must understand a company’s competitive advantage and build a strategy that takes into account the competitive landscape. The importance difference you’ll note today is the speed at which your competition can change.

The truth is that there is no one “true” path to innovation because innovation, at its core, is about solving problems and every enterprise chooses different problems to solve.

While IBM might be happy to have its scientists work for decades on some arcane technology and Google gladly allows its employees to pursue pet projects, those things probably wouldn’t fly at Amazon. However, the one thing that all great innovators have in common is that culture and practice are deeply intertwined.

That’s what makes them so hard to copy. Anybody can write a six-page memo or start meetings with a reading period. It’s not those specific practices, but the commitment to the values they reflect, that has driven Amazon’s incredible success.

The bottom line

The new management challenges have the ability to negatively influence your future if left alone. Have you noticed that young companies are often filled with young management who have little to unlearn and meet these challenges head-on?

I wager that tomorrow’s best management innovators of change won’t come from the Fortune 500. What do you think?

Have a question or opinion to add in the comments section below? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.  

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

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Studying Innovative Change for Creative Business Ideas

The Most Innovative Company? Our Answer May Surprise You

What Is the Larry Page Vision?