Leadership of Innovation 2 - Communicating the Why’s
18 Nov 16
Inzpire
In my previous blog, I focussed on how innovation leaders create an environment in which innovation thrives and where a shared vision is understood and enacted by all.
However, there is something else just as important as shared vision in catalysing innovation: the need to convincingly communicate why the organisation exists in the first place.
This is about asking some genuinely fundamental questions:
Why is the organisation here?
What is its underlying purpose, over and above making money?
What is it’s raison d’etre?
What is it for?
Why is it a good thing?
What does it do for society?
Why should we be proud of it?
Why would anyone want to work for it?
These are profound questions; the answers to which (if they are the right answers!) fertilise the rich soil from which innovation grows. People say that necessity is the mother of invention, and that is true, but the father of invention is motivation, and there is no stronger innovation motivation than feeling that you are engaged in a noble cause.
At Inzpire, our organisational purpose is to create a “revolution of honour, integrity and trust in the defence industrial environment”, and this, together with our 15-year shared vision, are the bedrock and soil from which all our innovative thinking grows.
‘Honour’, ‘integrity’, ‘trust’ and ‘nobility’ are unusual and somewhat old fashioned words that one does not often hear in a business context. Here at Inzpire, however, you hear them all the time. We set out, from the start, to be different to the norm and we take great pride in having a different lexicon, and alternative DNA, to other organisations.
Old fashioned concepts like ‘honour’, ‘integrity’, ‘trust’ and ‘nobility’ are important to us and we are not embarrassed to say so. Some say this makes us naïve in the cutthroat world of business. We say, “look at our success and make up your own mind”.
Our model undeniably works. Despite the fact that everything about Inzpire is most definitely not the product of mainstream thinking, we have become giant slayers in many areas, winning major defence contracts off companies 6000 times our size. A lot of this is attributable to how we think. For example, we take the view that profit is not actually an end in itself but a by-product of a life well lived. What other defence company talks like that?
In my next blog, I am going to explore the absolute need to trust people so that they can get on with innovating without constant interference from the boss at the top of the organisation.
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