Innovation Leadership

In the world of work, the single greatest asset of successful individuals, teams, and organizations is their mindset - what happens in between their ears. It's not the corporate strategy, the sales compensation plan, or the market segments they're pursuing. It is what each leader, team member, and employee chooses to focus on, to believe, and to create for themselves and others.

In Sticky Leaders, Larry Osborne, an innovative leader in pastoral ministry, reveals the hidden secret behind serial innovation and shows leaders how to navigate the landmines of leading through change in ways that will provide new levels of stability and creativity to any organization.

The history-making development of the Chinese economy has entered a new phase: China is moving aggressively from a strategy of imitation to one of innovation. Driven both by domestic needs and by global ambition, China is establishing itself at the forefront of technological innovation. Western businesses need to prepare for a tidal wave of innovation from China that is about to hit Western markets, and Chinese businesses need to understand the critical importance of innovation in their future.

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.

What can you learn from the world’s most successful companies? The Marvel Studios Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled a struggling comic book publisher to parlay the power of myth and storytelling to become one of history’s most successful movie studios.

Almost 20 years ago, Clayton Christensen popularized the term disruption in his book The Innovator's Dilemma, describing it as a set of risks that established firms face. Since then, few have closely examined his account. Joshua Gans does so in this book. He looks at companies that have proven resilient and those that have fallen and explains why some companies have successfully managed disruption while others have not.

An inside snapshot view of the innovative Seattle church called Mars Hill and its Acts 29 network. This audiobook provides - with a touch of sarcasm and humor - both principles and practices shared from the people actually doing missional church ministry with people often untouched by todays traditional and contemporary churches.

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.

Gary Hamel lays out an innovative action plan for any company or individual intent on becoming and staying an industry revolutionary, for years to come. By drawing on the success of "gray haired revolutionaries" like Charles Schwab, Virgin, and GE Capital - companies that are always thinking ahead and growing in new directions - and profiling individuals such as Ken Kutaragi, one of the pioneers behind Sony's PlayStation, Hamel explains how companies can continue to grow, innovate, and achieve success.

Mind Tools for Managers helps new and experienced leaders develop the skills they need to be more effective in everything they do. It brings together the 100 most important leadership skills - as voted for by 15,000 managers and professionals worldwide - into a single volume, providing an easy-access solutions manual for people wanting to be the best manager they can be. Each chapter details a related group of skills, plus the tools you need to put ideas into practice.

What Matters Now is Gary Hamel's impassioned plea to rethink the fundamental assumptions we have about management, the meaning of work, and organizational life. He asks, "What are the fundamental, make-or-break issues that will determine whether your organization thrives or dives in the years ahead?"

Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms zeros in on the cutting-edge thinkers who repeatedly create and deliver breakthrough innovations and new products in large, mature organizations. These employees are organizational powerhouses who solve consumer problems and substantially contribute to the financial value to their firms.

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.

How can great companies do everything right - identify real customer needs, deliver excellent innovations, beat their competitors to market - and still fail? The sad truth is that many companies fail because they focus too intensely on their own innovations, and then neglect the innovation ecosystems on which their success depends. In our increasingly interdependent world, winning requires more than just delivering on your own promises. It means ensuring that a host of partners - some visible, some hidden - deliver on their promises, too.

Highly acclaimed author, trainer, and presenter Paul Sloane demonstrates how the lateral leader develops the vision, culture, and processes that transform a regular business into an innovation hothouse. With a lively, energetic and practical approach, The Leader's Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills will teach you dynamic, up-to-date techniques to unleash the creative energies of your people and reveal how to put the techniques to work immediately.

Innovation is the subject of countless books and courses, but there's very little out there about how you actually innovate. Innovation and entrepreneurship are not one and the same, although aspiring innovators often think of them that way. They are told to get an idea and a team and to build a show-and-tell for potential investors. In Innovating, Luis Perez-Breva describes another approach.

In Fostering Innovation: How to Build an Amazing IT Team, accomplished technology strategist, executive, and leader Andrew Laudato delivers an eye-opening exploration of how to design, build, staff, and run a high-performing IT department. The book is filled with universally applicable strategies and techniques that can transform any IT team into an all-star cast perfectly aligned with your organization's objectives.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

As leaders or parents (or both), navigating difficult conversations is part of our job description. How do we keep calm and achieve a productive outcome, all while keeping our relationships intact? The secret is curiosity. It is the innovation-driving, emotion-calming skill that comes so naturally to us as kids but gets buried so easily beneath our busy, multitasking lifestyles as adults. The good news is that we just have to relearn what we already know!

In today’s changing world, where business leaders must navigate industry disruption, entrepreneurs struggle to push beyond initial success, and activists tackle hard challenges like climate change, there is a need for a more powerful way to do innovation. Too many innovators are trapped by the limits of common innovation practices. The way we’ve been taught to create and innovate for the past two decades is failing us. It’s time for a paradigm shift. To unlock the secrets to doing bigger things, this book introduces the pioneering concept of ecosystem innovation.