Innovative leadership needs concrete ways to envision, define and describe the organizational strategy model for realizing innovation success. Now more than ever, innovative leaders must not fall into the trappings of their traditional leadership behaviors.

When you make the effort to model or otherwise graphically depict your innovation strategy, the innovative leadership team members and your partners are empowered to put the strategy to the test, they can experiment with it, they can stretch it to its limits and better communicate its possibilities to others.

"Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays." - Soren Kierkegaard

As Kierkegaard points out, the innovation strategy is not what changes, it is we who deploy the strategy to encourage, energize, enlighten, engage, extend and empower our efforts to achieve its ends who will change.

The major reasons for modeling your innovation strategy are to help focus you on, guide you into and highlight the granular yet measurable details of your strategic intentions.

Every innovation strategy must give innovative leadership teams the means to accomplish three critical tasks:

1) Direct all activities

2) Develop all resources

3) Discipline all players

When innovative leadership teams design their model of the innovation strategy for discovering fertile markets, solving technological challenges, expanding the business or designing robust organizational processes, their recipes should include:

=> A window on their historical, internal and external realities;

=> Systems or processes to help you better respond to and handle the rigors of change;

=> Focused injections of those positive leadership energies needed to inspire, rejuvenate and educate all your stakeholders;

=> Validated or reliable metrics which gives you the ability to unravel the mysteries of organizational energy exchanges, dependencies and transfers;

=> Defining the communications of your vision's beliefs, meanings and feelings;

=> Comprehending the relationships between the observed, measured and assumed;

=> Indicating opportunity "areas" where the innovation strategy could and should be implemented.

"Cast aside those who liken godliness to whimsy and who try to combine their greed for wealth with their desire for a happy afterlife." - Kahlil Gibran

Too many managers believe they can borrow an innovation strategy. I've heard some tell their people: "Be more creative!" Unfortunately, those strategies neither inspire, encourage or empower people to use their talents effectively or to believe in the sincerity of their innovative leaders.

In this Age when imagination is the primary driver of competitive advantage, your innovation strategy is the only way to strive for and achieve sustainable success.

Innovative leadership performs well when a comprehensive model for the innovation strategy is formulated, diagrammed and being followed - in a word, innovative excellence happens through a proven model for success.

Copyright © 2007, Mustard Seed Investments Inc., All rights reserved.