Innovating Innovation. David Morey
in 1968, won all three Olympic alpine gold medals. He once told an interviewer about how, when he was recovering from a terrible downhill accident and was unable to ski, he continued to practice mentally. Was that a distant second best to being on the slopes? Common sense says yes. Yet Killy went from mental practice to delivering one of the best performances of his career.
Killy’s experience reminds me of Daley Thompson, who, like me, was a Decathlete. Unlike me, he won the Olympic Decathlon—twice. In 1984, he faced a high-drama athletic contest with his archrival, West Germany’s Juergen Hingsen, for the unofficial title of “world’s greatest athlete.” Each man had more than once traded world records, even if the UK’s Thompson had beaten Hingsen head-to-head on six consecutive occasions before entering the 1984 Olympics. When the competition for the gold, the 1984 Los Angeles Games, moved to the Decathlon’s seventh event, the discus, Thompson was keenly aware that this was his worst event and Hingsen’s best. Indeed, Thompson’s first two throws were well below even his normally weak measurement.
But on this day of all days, when it counted, Thompson drew on his imagination to visualize a winning throw. He imagined he had the right to be a great discus thrower, and he hurled the metal-and-wood plate to a personal best on his third and final throw, crushing the West German’s spirt and chance for gold.
“For that one moment,” Thompson explains, “I wasn’t interested in winning. Some people shy away from the high-pressure moments. It was what I had been looking for, a culmination of all I had trained for. Just to be faced with the situation in an Olympics—the feeling was incredible. And I’d faced it and overcome the thing I’m least competent in, the discus. I really hit the shit out of that discus.”
Jean-Claude Killy and Daley Thompson both practiced believing, visualizing each step toward success. When it counted most, their physical selves followed an internal belief and deep commitment they built from within. The truth is, it really does all begin with you. As a business leader, your own internal mindset and self-belief are your most powerful tools. Believing you are a bold and successful change leader and innovator is the first and fundamental step toward becoming…a bold and successful change leader and innovator.
Preparing internally to drive innovation breakthrough means taking yourself as seriously as you want others to take you. From working with top corporate CEOs and political leaders of many countries, I have discovered that each of them believes they are a top CEO or political leader. Their own affirmative self-image is a powerful driver, filter, and vision they aim at, move toward, and access. They take their leadership and their success earnestly, and this becomes a self-fulfilling element in leadership and success.
As business author and entrepreneur Tony Robbins reminds us, “Most people doubt their beliefs and believe their doubts.” Like the great and resilient athletes they were, Jean-Claude Killy and Daley Thompson used the power of visualization, the fuel of imagination, to give them the enduring self-confidence to face rejection after rejection. Innovators need thick skin to overcome the impostor syndrome by visualizing and believing in their own success. Knocked down, they see themselves getting up off the floor—and then they do just that.
Consider, for example, the number of times the founders of the following companies pitched investors before finally securing funding for their innovations:
• Skype 40
• Cisco 76
• Pandora 300
• Google 350
Or consider the 302 rejections Roy Disney received from the banks he approached to fund his “new” amusement park, Disneyland. Or the Social Security check sixty-five-year-old Colonel Sanders cashed, which led him to pledge prophetically to himself: “I’m going to build something new with my life, I’m going to create something called ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken.’ ”
Research shows that successful innovators deeply believe three things:
• First, innovation is there—it exists or will exist.
• Second, innovation must and will be found.
• Third, innovation will be worth it once it is found.
Invariably, all three of these core beliefs are a part of innovation success—an inner belief that innovation can happen, will happen, and will be worth the journey. In fact, this inner belief—and the leader’s ability to cascade and leverage it within the organization—has never been more important in creating and sustaining a culture of innovation and a successful business. Put another way, the ability to leverage belief is the minimal requirement to advancing leadership, company, and product breakthroughs and doing what it takes to grow a business: increasing the number of customers, the average transaction value, and the frequency of repurchase. It is essential to what pioneering marketer Sergio Zyman described as the job of marketing and innovation: “Sell more stuff, to more people, more often, for more money, more efficiently.”
Leveraging belief strips away the impostor syndrome and commits to an insurgent way of thinking about playing offense and driving innovation forward. Or else. At key times, this means channeling the do-or-die analogy constructed by Napoleon Hill in his 1937 classic, Think and Grow Rich. Hill applied the lessons of Conquistador Hernán Cortés. Back in 1519, as he landed on the shores of Mexico’s Yucatan, he knew the odds were against him. He had to convince his crew of 600 sailors and soldiers that he truly believed and that they must as well. So, he scuttled his ships. With no means of turning back, there was no choice but to believe in victory. As Hill puts it:
A long while ago, a great warrior faced a situation which made it necessary for him to make a decision which insured his success on the battlefield.… Addressing his men before the first battle, he said, “You see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win! We now have no choice—we win, or we perish!” They won. Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat. Only by so doing can one be sure of maintaining that state of mind known as a burning desire to win, essential to success.
Linear Innovation:
Second—Think Innovation Not Invention
Sergio Zyman constructed a wonderfully fresh approach to innovation in his 2004 book, Renovate Before You Innovate: Why Doing the New Thing Might Not Be the Right Thing. Too often, Zyman argues, the conventional quest for innovation amounts to a search for a shiny new object. Or, as Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, puts it on the inside cover of Zyman’s book: “Management thinkers, business writers, and global executives have too long been infatuated with the Next Big Thing. But the next thing is not always big and the big thing is not always next.”
Extending Zyman and Moore’s argument into today’s business environment, we see that many companies habitually close their eyes and reflexively swing for the fences. They try to invent their way out of the ballpark with the Next Big Thing. In 2004, Zyman and Moore argued that such thinking is a mistake. Today, I argue it is more of a mistake than ever.
Instead of blindly swinging to invent the Next Big Thing, business leaders do better to focus on disrupting, renovating, and innovating their thinking, destination, battlefield map, attitudinal segmentation, brand positioning, customer experience, core strategy, and executional campaign. They are better off innovating rather than trying to invent their way to success.
As Kuhn might put it: Focus on “normal science,” step-by-step progress, and “puzzle-solving,” rather than “revolutionary science” and history’s oh-so-rare paradigm shifts. Instead of inventing the Next Big Thing, focus on innovating every single day.
This is what America’s most iconic “inventor,” Thomas Edison, did. His ethos of innovation—in contrast to invention—underpins our argument. Take the light bulb. The most prolific inventor of our age, Edison set out, he said, to “subdivide light.” In this quest, he was fueled by the deep-seated belief that he could really do this. But it did not take genius. Edison replaced genius—inventing something from nothing—with analogy, innovating something by spring-boarding off something else. He worked step-by-step to create the incandescent electric light. He played the