Innovation. Are you a walker or a talker?
Today, I ran across a good article about leaders and innovation in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Great companies have CEO’s who actually DO innovative work and not just mouth a party line. And they actually do that innovative work for 25-30% of their overall work time. Yup. It takes work – thinking, asking questions, probing, networking, prototyping, experimenting – to create a company of innovators. Companies that deliver products and services that others believe in.
These aren’t just observations, a survey of 6,000 managers (from CEO’s to line managers) say you can’t have a leading company without leaders who put in personal legwork.
Leaders walk the walk. If you are a leader that doesn’t, then I’ve got some advice from Nancy Sinatra. “Boots! Start walkin’!”