Get a Jump Start on Increasing C-Suite Innovation in 2022

Pam Harper (00:00): Is your C-suite ready for business innovation?

Scott Harper (00:03): Let's talk about that…

Pam Harper (00:05): Join us for episode 196 of Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper.

Chris Curran (00:21): This episode is brought to you by Business Advancement Incorporated, enabling successful leaders and companies to accelerate to their next level of growth on the web at businessadvance.com. And now here's Pam and Scott.

Pam Harper (00:36): Thanks, Chris. I'm Pam Harper, Founding Partner and CEO of Business Advancement Incorporated. And sitting right across from me as always is my business partner and husband, Scott Harper. Hi, Scott.

Scott Harper (00:49): Hi, Pam. It's great to be joining you again for another episode of Growth Igniters Radio. And as always, our purpose is to spark your insights, inspiration, and immediately useful ideas to help visionary leaders accelerate themselves, and their companies of course, to their next level of game-changing innovation transformation and growth.

Pam, as many of our listeners know, we talk about innovation a lot; we see it as very important. And in fact, a lot of C-suite leaders have been asking us about why there's such a growing expectation over the past 10 years or so that the C-suite -- not just R&D, not just the development people, but the C-suite -- needs to take a greater role in shaping and supporting innovation.

Pam Harper (01:31): It's something that we need to talk about because this is a trend that's only going to keep accelerating as time goes on. I can look back, and I remember in 2009, when the world was going through a profound shift, there were still these Dilbert panels, the cartoons, that said, "Change is good, you go first." And then things started changing. There were more people that I was talking with who were CEOs and C-suites, and they were looking at growing, not just to respond and adapt to what was coming at them, but in fact, to reinvent their companies for growth. And this was so much so that I ended up being a founder of a conference called Reinventing Your Business Through Innovation.

Scott Harper (02:21): Right, and this embraced not just developing new offerings - new products and services and so on, but new ways of working, who does the work, where they do it, how they do it, who they do it for.

Pam Harper (02:33): This was in response to changes involving markets and global competition and demographics and technology and regulations, so many factors coming into play all at once. So fast forward, and you've got tremendously heightened stakeholder expectations for the short-term and the long-term. So there's a lot more expectation that companies are going to serve employees differently, that they're going to respond to new needs in the marketplace, that they're going to respond to customers in new ways, and investors in new ways, and partners in new ways. So there's a tremendous balancing act to say, "How do we continue to live into the purpose that we're all about, yet stay responsive and competitive against all of these changes?"

Scott Harper (03:27): Right. Now, it's natural for some people to look at all of these changes and these changing expectations as pressures, as threats, as challenges to overcome. But at the same time, the very changes, the very changing expectations, very changing technologies, and so on offer enormous opportunity if we can find what the new emerging needs are and the opportunities that we can use to meet them in ways that have never been done before.

Pam Harper (03:56): Right. This all sounds very abstract, but by the end of this episode, we will talk about some concrete, tangible things that we can help our listeners with in terms of bringing this to life.

Scott Harper (04:08): Now, one of the first things we need to do though is come down to what are we really talking about when we're talking about business innovation?

Pam Harper (04:15): That's right.

Scott Harper (04:16): It's going beyond generating new offerings, new things that people buy.

Pam Harper (04:20): It's not the new flavor of something.

Scott Harper (04:23): Right, or even a new iteration of a device or what have you. It is how do we actually structure our business and maybe go off in a new direction because there's a new opportunity.

Pam Harper (04:39): And because you're talking about something that involves a lot of different moving parts, you're talking about a holistic approach so that you don't have, for instance, IT innovating in one way, while R&D is innovating in another, while HR is innovating in another.

Scott Harper (04:58): And marketing expects something entirely different.

Pam Harper (05:01): Exactly. So everything comes together so that when you're talking about business innovation, it is literally the business moving together as an entity to transform and grow.

Scott Harper (05:13): Right. And that's why the C-suite is expected to have a stronger role in this because the C-suite are the people who really define and create governance that determines how the company runs and what it does and what the strategy is in service of the vision.

Pam Harper (05:30): Exactly. So one of the questions that we also get is where does business innovation fit in with strategy? And here's the thing, innovation is the strategy.

Scott Harper (05:43): Right, just take the example of the COVID-19 vaccine that Pfizer and BioNTech developed. Before the pandemic hit, they were already working on mRNA vaccines for flu, but when the virus came up and was declared a pandemic, BioNTech very quickly developed candidates for the antigen that would be part of the vaccine, and Pfizer said at the highest level, "Okay, we are changing our strategy to innovate and put everything we have into developing a vaccine for this virus." And they were able to do that because responding to a critical need was an innovating, was a critical foundation of their strategy.

Pam Harper (06:39): Let's dig deeper on this. There are a number of studies that are out there where CEOs and C-suites are surveyed about the importance of innovation, and the general consensus is that, yes, it's very important.

Scott Harper (06:58): Innovation is good.

Pam Harper (06:59): It's good, except that when they dig deeper in these studies, sometimes as much as half of the respondents say, "But we're not ready."

Scott Harper (07:11): Ooh...

Pam Harper (07:12): ...They're not doing anything with it yet.

Scott Harper (07:13): Okay. "Innovation is good, but we can't do it yet..."

Pam Harper (07:17): They want to move forward with bold innovation in either offerings or business models and processes, but they don't believe that they have the right people in place, the right technology in place, and other kinds of issues, not enough resources in place, so they're not ready. Here's the thing. Readiness is an illusion.

Scott Harper (07:45): Okay...

Pam Harper (07:46): It often masks uncertainty in the face of ambiguity. Here's the challenge. Everything is changing so quickly. It's a moving target. So as soon as you get one piece of the readiness puzzle completed, you're out of date. Get the right people in, the technology changes. Get the right technology in, the people change. Resources get redirected...

Scott Harper (08:12): ...Needs change...

Pam Harper (08:13): ...Regulations come up... And these are real issues.

Scott Harper (08:18): But here's the thing. Readiness is relative. I mean, think about what happened when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Many, many leaders told us, "Wow, we did things in weeks that it would have taken us months or even years to do."

Pam Harper (08:39): In record time.

Scott Harper (08:40): Yes. "We innovated like crazy." Well, why? Because they had to, because the status quo was wiped out. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. And when it's innovate or go under, it's amazing what we can do, what we can do differently in terms of offerings, in terms of how work is done, and so on.

Pam Harper (09:04): Yes, that's true. Another big difference is that there's greater tolerance, or there has been a greater tolerance for the natural messiness of innovation. So mistakes can happen, but people also were able to learn from them. There was more tolerance for learning, and that's an important aspect. Instead of waiting to be ready, another way to look at this is to say, "Start where you are," because once you actually start on the innovation journey, and there's a conscious decision as there was with vaccines, as there has been with other things that we've been seeing-

Scott Harper (09:49): New ways of working and so on, yeah.

Pam Harper (09:49): All of that... as the steps unfold, you can't always know in this rapidly changing environment exactly how it's all going to unfold, but you take it in manageable pieces and move towards where you want to go. So when you have the strategic business, innovation focus, the best way to embrace it is to help people to understand where we're all going and to provide them with the agency to be able to make choices to create the new reality.

Scott Harper (10:29): Agency?

Pam Harper (10:30): In other words, empowerment, that they are able to make their own choices to a certain extent.

Scott Harper (10:37): Within a framework.

Pam Harper (10:39): Right. So we saw this, for instance, with COVID-19. People weren't waiting for permission.

Scott Harper (10:46): Yeah, they did what seemed right. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Pam Harper (10:51): Tali Sharot wrote a book called "The Influential Mind," and the subtitle is "What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others." It's based upon substantial research that she did, and what they found among other things is that when people perceive that their agency is being expanded, as she puts it, they embrace the experience, they find it rewarding, and that enables them to want to take the actions, even in the midst of ambiguity, because you're moving towards what you want. So people are more ready for innovation, for making new choices, than we think. The key is that they have to feel a certain amount of control.

Scott Harper (11:39): Right. And they have to have a clear framework for the big picture of where we're going, what success looks like.

Pam Harper (11:46): That's part of how you get that feeling of control. When you understand what's happening, it makes it a lot easier to make decisions and to feel good about those decisions.

Scott Harper (11:57): That makes an enormous amount of sense. So let's take a moment and talk about ways that C-suite leaders can help themselves and the people in their companies be ready for business innovation in the broader sense.

Pam Harper (12:11): The big theme here is "change the conversations."

Scott Harper (12:16): Change conversations, and you change outcomes.

Pam Harper (12:18): That's right. Stop saying, "We're not ready yet." Start saying, "Let's talk about the things that are getting in our way." Remember, Scott, we had a situation with a client once, and people all agreed that it was important for them to innovate and move forward. They had a big launch that they were involved with, product launch, and yet there was confusion. "Why is nothing happening?" And as we spoke with people, it turned out that there were a lot of elephants in the room.

Scott Harper (12:52): Yeah, there was uncertainty and "What am I doing? What are they doing?"

Pam Harper (12:57): Everybody thought that everybody else was doing something else.

Scott Harper (13:00): But nobody realized that everybody was confused, and this was-

Pam Harper (13:05): And they were confused about the same thing.

Scott Harper (13:06): They were confused about the same thing. So when we helped them create a safe environment to have those conversations, because nobody wanted to embarrass themselves and say, "I'm the only stupid one here," things happened so quickly. They were ready to innovate.

Pam Harper (13:24): And we're talking about senior-level people.

Scott Harper (13:26): Sure.

Pam Harper (13:27): So I think it's important to say that this doesn't just happen across the front lines. This is happening at the top. So these elephants need to be freed, and one of the biggest elephants is accountabilities in the C-suite. I've had situations with clients where two members of the C-suite with different titles actually had overlapping accountabilities.

Scott Harper (13:56): That didn't turn out well, did it?

Pam Harper (13:56): The challenge is that when you have different names, and a lot of C-suite positions are being created now, and it comes about for good reasons. I mean, these are well-intentioned people. I think it's important to say right off the top that the C-suite teams that I've ever dealt with are all well-intentioned, smart, savvy people. And so they created these new positions, and somehow because they were taken from pieces of this and other pieces of that and-

Scott Harper (14:30): Right; that happens a lot in M&A for instance.

Pam Harper (14:33): Sure. And this was a company that was rapidly growing. So in this case, there were two people who realized that the elephant in the room, they knew it, they knew it, didn't want to talk about it, but when we were able to raise it, they could recognize what they were going to do to create a more functional C-suite team. And business innovation was able to take off.

Scott Harper (15:01): And building on clarity of accountability in the C-suite is the issue of alignment, starting at the top board CEO, C-suite, moving on down through your organization so that people understand what the vision is, what their role in bringing that to life is, and what each other are doing.

Pam Harper (15:24): And of course, we're talking about a moving target, so it's not once and done. It's a process. And that's why a few years ago, I came up with a sheet that I call Five Things to Ask When You Need to Move Even Faster, and it's about alignment. And it starts with vision because the thing is that periodically you have to keep asking, "Are we in sync? How do we know it?" And that was the big point of that sheet was to say, "Well, do people really know where we're going? How do we know it? What's happening? What would be happening?"

Scott Harper (16:06): Right. And what does success look like?

Pam Harper (16:08): This is the starting point.

Scott Harper (16:10): And you can download a copy of Five Questions to Ask When You Want to Move Even Faster by going to growthignitersradio.com, selecting episode 186, and you'll find a link to it under resources. Pam, any final thoughts on the issue of the C-suite's role in being ready for innovation?

Pam Harper (16:31): As the world is changing in so many ways, faster than ever before, we don't have time to wait for our companies to be ready for business innovation. You might miss out. Start where you are by changing the conversation with your stakeholders. You're probably more ready than you realize.

Scott Harper (16:51): Thanks, Pam. And thanks to you out there for listening to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. To get show notes and resource links for this week's episode, go to growthignitersradio.com and select episode 196.

Pam Harper (17:07): Until next time, this is Pam Harper...

Scott Harper (17:09): And Scott Harper...

Pam Harper (17:10): ... wishing you continued success and leaving you with this question to discuss with your team.

Scott Harper (17:16): If we believe, as so many of our C-suite peers do, that business innovation is critical to success in the short-term and the long-term, what is one thing we can do starting today that will accelerate that journey?

Chris Curran (17:33): Growth Igniters and Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper are registered service marks of Business Advancement Incorporated. All Growth Igniters Radio episodes are copyrighted productions of Business Advancement Incorporated intended for the private use of our audience. Except as otherwise provided by copyright law, all other uses, including copying, editing, redistribution, and publication without the prior written consent of Business Advancement Incorporated are prohibited. All rights reserved.