Innovation Leadership

If you read (or listen to) nothing else on inspiring and executing innovation, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you innovate effectively.

Filled with illuminating case studies and brilliant in-depth analysis, this invaluable book provides a multitude of insights that will help you weather market upheavals, adapt to disruptions, and optimize your resources to your best advantage.

Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation and the general manager of IDEO, the world-famous design firm, illuminates the strategies IDEO used to beat the devil's advocate and drive creativity throughout the organization.

Why is it that so many gifted and passionate leaders end up on the sidelines of ministry rather than finishing well? How can you avoid the pitfalls that face those who serve Christ and his church? What steps can you take that will propel you forward into a more faithful and fruitful ministry than you ever dreamed? These questions and more are addressed in Leadership from the Inside Out.

Jobs to Be Done gives you a clear-cut framework for thinking about your business, outlines a road map for discovering new markets, new products, and new services, and helps you generate creative opportunities to innovate your way to success.

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

The subject of “design thinking” is the rage at business schools, throughout corporations, and increasingly in the popular press - due in large part to work of IDEO, a leading design firm, and its celebrated CEO, Tim Brown, who uses this audiobook to reveal how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is an audiobook for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Written by world-renowned expert in transformation, best-selling author, and award-winning teacher, scholar, and global advisor Behnam Tabrizi, Going on Offense is a must-listen for any organization looking to stay innovative and competitive in today's rapidly changing market. Armed with this book, a company will be able to go on offense—continually improving its culture, adapting to new environments, and expanding into new territories.

Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the "collective genius" of the people in the organization.

Entrepreneur and best-selling author of The Lean Startup Eric Ries reveals how entrepreneurial principles can be used by businesses ranging from established companies to early stage startups to grow revenues, drive innovation, and emerge as truly modern organizations poised to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the 21st century.

Bina Venkataraman sees the way forward. A journalist and former adviser in the Obama White House, she helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead - and what can be done to change that. In The Optimist’s Telescope, she draws from stories she has reported around the world and new research in biology, psychology, and economics to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time.

Every company today relies on data, yet many leadership teams struggle to fully leverage data as an asset while avoiding ethics scandals that erode consumer trust. This indispensable guide provides executives and board members an actionable playbook to transform their organization into an ethical data leader poised for innovation and growth.

Companies are fighting the wrong battle. The consensus has been to learn the best practices from Big Tech and imitate them. But new paths for growth aren't created by imitation; they're forged by radical differentiation. In Smart Rivals, Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and former Bloomberg journalist Bonnie Cao show business leaders how to create new competitive advantages by offering product features and benefits that tech giants and other competitors cannot match.

In Sticky Church, author and pastor Larry Osborne makes the case that closing the back door of your church is even more important than opening the front door wider. He offers a time-tested strategy for doing so: sermon-based small groups that dig deeper into the weekend message and tightly velcro members to the ministry. It's a strategy that enabled Osborne's congregation to grow from a handful of people to one of the larger churches in the nation - without any marketing or special programming. Sticky Church tells the inspiring story of North Coast Church's phenomenal growth and offers practical tips.

A movement is rumbling through the body of Christ - a revolutionary army of people giving hope to a hurting world through practical, personal acts of service. In Servolution, Dino Rizzo shares the story of his relentless pursuit of ways to bless the lost, poor, and hurting people of his community in Jesus' name. You'll be amazed and inspired by the incredible ways God has used Healing Place Church to meet the needs of thousands of people.

Are you in the process of reinventing yourself or your organization? Innovation Starts with I will help you future-proof yourself through a transformative journey of self-discovery. In this awe-inspiring work that explores self-awareness as an integral prerequisite to an innovative mindset, Saleema Vellani, entrepreneur and innovation strategist, serves to re-envision innovation. As we navigate the current Reinvention Revolution, one thing has become crystal clear: Innovation isn’t just about technology—it’s about being human.

Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business-one that is still thriving-while dramatically reinventing it?

Chaotic Change is designed to be a comprehensive guide for leaders, innovators, and change-makers navigating the complexities of the modern business landscape. Through personal anecdotes, case studies, and practical strategies, this book provides a roadmap for managing chaotic change—a process that drives and sustains innovation. From grasping the dynamics of strategic excellence to fostering a culture of happiness and clarity within organizations, each section builds on the next, offering a holistic approach to change management.

How did Ford Motors use Lean development to pull off one of the most impressive corporate turnarounds in history? Largely by avoiding the mistakes that so many companies make when in a death spiral. They looked beyond manufacturing efficiency to change the very fundamentals of how they developed vehicles. In Designing the Future, Lean product development expert James Morgan and world-renowned Lean guru Jeffrey K. Liker reveal why so many companies have achieved only moderate success with Lean in operations, with a limited impact on their overall business.

Imagine a company where everyone loves to work, where employees feel not just "satisfied" but truly cared for, respected, and energized. Think of the impact this would have on recruitment, retention, customer satisfaction, innovation, and overall performance. Aron Ain, the award-winning CEO of Kronos, a global provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions, believes that anything is possible when people are inspired.