Daily Inspiration: Mastering Innovation – “World class innovators check their speed and focus on corporate agility”

“World class innovators check their speed and focus on corporate agility” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Futurist Jim Carroll is running his Daily Inspiration series for March 11/18 on the theme of “What is it that World Class Innovators Do That Others Don’t Do?” The leadership ideas are based on an original keynote he gave early in 2009 after a client asked him to identify these issues. He developed this carefully curated list based on 15 years of observations of how his global clients responded to fast-paced change. 

You would think that I’m somewhat focused on the issue of speed as a core metric of success.

I come by it honestly.

After all, several of my books play into the theme – The Future Belongs to Those Who Are Fast being one of them. (Another one carries the theme in the subtitle: Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast.)

And yet, this isn’t just a simple idea to latch onto to write a few books. At the time I was compiling my list of ‘world-class innovators’ during the global economic recession of 2008-09, there was a clear focus on the issue of responding to speed through corporate agility. Check the Google Trends insight chart for that!

All around me, I witnessed organizations and their leadership teams becoming focused on their speed of response to rapidly changing circumstances – there was a lot of talk about the need for corporate agility and flexibility. I saw this within the discussion points raised by the companies who were booking me around that time – the CEO or other individual responsible for bringing me into a corporate event needed examples and stories of how ‘world-class innovators’, were learning to respond to fast change with fast action.

I captured this trend later in many of my presentations, where I directly took on the issue of speed and agility.

My observations?

“We live in the most staggering time of acceleration. The challenge is this – the challenge is comprehending the speed! I spend my time with fortune 500 organizations worldwide helping them to comprehend and adjust and align ourselves to a world in which the future belongs to those who are fast. I’m going to talk about the future, I’m going to talk about trends – and it’s going to be your ability to ingest these trends and turn them into opportunity that will increasingly define your future!

If you think about what is going on – if you think about the speed of change – it’s so encompassing, it’s so overwhelming, that increasingly the future belongs to those who are fast. Every day you open the news, you look at what is occurring and you realize the scope of change is stunning. We’re in an era in which multiple trends are coming together – artificial intelligence, 3d printing, additive manufacturing, the internet of things. You take all of the trends which are coming together and you realize that we‘ve never witnessed a period in which so much change is coming at us so quickly.

We’re in a situation in which companies that do not yet exist will build products not yet conceived based on ideas not yet generated use materials not yet invented with manufacturing methodologies that aren’t yet in existence.

I think increasingly that’s our reality going forward. Success will not come from your history, success will not come from your legacy,  success will not come from what you’ve done in the past – it will come from your ability to ingest fast-paced change. What you really need to do going forward is think big start small, and scale faster!”

The idea was also captured in my World Class Innovators video – noting that not only did they focus on speed, but they also obsess over it!

(My favorite moment in the clip came with the perfectly timed landing behind me. We filmed this at the end of a runway at Toronto’s Pearson Airport; it took a few takes to perfect the timing!)

Corporate agility? The idea was becoming all the rage – fast-moving realities meant that the ability to respond with the speed of action was critical. This fed into a keynote I did for the global leadership team of Yum! Brands – that’s the parent of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut – in Las Vegas.

Quite clearly, a new leadership paradigm was emerging, one that lasts to today, that consists of three key ideas:

• Speed: An acknowledgment by leadership that speed now defines success – and that the future belongs to those who are fast!
• Agility: Success is defined by the ability to respond to rapidly changing products, markets, business models, economic trends, competitors, and skills issues.
• Results: The organization quickly pivots with identified trends, responds to fast emerging volatility, and is now structured for speed.

The idea that the future belongs to those who are fast and that organizations need to think big, start small, and scale fast?

It directly comes from the fact that world-class innovators focus on those ideas as key factors for thriving in a world that is becoming ever faster, and which the era of acceleration is clearly upon us!