An invention can only be viewed as an innovation when it is adopted into practice. While many believe that inventions are the main causes of innovations, this belief is the “invention myth,” referring to those that seek innovation by stimulating creativity.

Creating new ideas, however, is very different from adopting them into practice. The “process myth” is a concept proposed in many business innovation books.

It is the “belief that innovations are the results of processes that can be managed.” While this myth is a compelling way to drive innovation, this method of following a logical order of steps does not always produce innovation.

Neither the invention or process myths reliably produce innovation.

Adopting a new practice into a community requires a clear view of the desired outcome of innovation. The outcome should be defined with the following aspects in mind:

* Community. The adoption of innovation must fit with existing practices of the people in the community, target a reasonably sized community, and offer a degree of change that the community can handle.

* Practices, Performance, and Skills. Both the community’s practices and the practices of innovation must be defined, keeping in mind that practices are:

1. Recurrent actions that have outcomes
2. Performed and embodied by an individual or group, at different skill levels
3. Subject to breakdown
4. Inclusive of mental, emotional, and body states
5. Embedded deeply in communities

* Adoption. The commitment of the community to consider a new practice, adopt it for the first time, and sustain it over a period of time.

* Success. The innovator is most likely to be successful when he is highly skilled in the community of practice to be changed (domain), influencing others (social interaction), and engaging with the environment (opportunities).

This article is based on the book ‘The Innovator’s Way.’ The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

The first of these key selling metrics is a salesperson’s close ratio, which is the total opportunities a salesperson has attempted to close in a specific period divided by actual sales closed in the same period. Knowing this figure is vital to understanding a salesperson’s overall selling effectiveness, as a low close rate can indicate potential issues in prospecting and qualifying.

Next, a salesperson should know is his or her “C to A” ratio. A “C” prospect is one with whom a salesperson has had an initial meeting, who has acknowledged a need or desire, but who has not made a decision to pursue a purchase.

An “A” prospect would be one who has made a decision to pursue a solution, for whom the salesperson has created a value proposition, and for whom the salesperson may have a solution. Knowing this ratio can be helpful in identifying possible communication difficulties or other issues that need to be addressed in the sales plan.

The final selling metric to consider is how many leads a salesperson has had handed to them versus how many opportunities he or she pursued independently. Knowing these three selling metrics will allow a salesperson to come up with a workable formula for setting sales goals.

For example, if a sales person has a close ratio of ten percent and wants to make fourteen sales, that means he or she will need 140 “A” leads. If his or her C to A ratio is 50 percent, he or she will need 280 “C” leads.

If the company is handing over 200 leads, the salesperson will need to generate 80 leads independently. Combined with a salesperson’s projected and actual performance, these selling metrics will enable a salesperson to set goals and make adjustments for his or her personal sales plan.

Ultimately, organization is what will make an individual’s daily drill a success. Learning to manage time and organize activities effectively is a huge stepping stone toward realizing an individual’s arc of potential.

The first step in this organization plan is to make a list of outstanding tasks, meetings, and to-do items, then prioritizing this list and creating a plan to complete each item. The next step is to create a list of work activities, from anticipated meetings and phone calls to outreach prospecting and personal activities.

These activities should encompass things that need to be accomplished daily as well as monthly and annual activities like performance reviews and special meetings. Finally, these activities need to then be prioritized according how important and/or time-sensitive they may be.

The most essential and time-sensitive activities will be top priority, and they are called a person’s 20 percent activities. During the next step, which involves integrating this list of activities into a workable calendar, 20 percent activities should be mapped out first, followed by the rest in order of diminishing importance and time-sensitivity.

The final step is to build and update a daily log of these activities. This will not only help to refine a salesperson’s selling metrics, but committing will ensure that they are actually followed through with.
Because not all activities are of equal importance or priority, there are a few key 20 percent actions that need to be focused on to maintain forward momentum.

These are “hell or high water” commitments, because a salesperson needs to make a pledge to get these items done no matter what happens. This will enable a salesperson to get very focused on the right activities, which combined with knowledge, will, and necessary skills, will inevitably lead to a vast improvement in overall selling performance.

This article is based on the book ‘Kick Your Own Ass.’ The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

By failing to guide their top performers to upper-level positions, organizations must spend money to recruit from the outside, suffer the dollar costs of slowing down careers while needing new leaders, and risk losing potential leaders to other companies.

The unwritten rules governing promotions to executive level are divided into three areas:
1. Non-negotiable factors that must be present for promotions.
2. Deselection factors that negate positive attributes.
3. Core selection factors that are the most critical to advancement.

Nonnegotiable factors begin with a strong track record of high performance and also include high integrity and unquestioned ethics, a drive to rise to the top, a strong work ethic, and the ability to handle pressure. Potential leaders must also be willing to make tough and sometimes unpopular decisions and stand by the results.

Deselection factors include things that are seen as unacceptable for a person who wants to rise to the highest levels. Although strong interpersonal skills do not guarantee success, very weak interpersonal skills generally prevent a top performer from advancing.

A person who appears insensitive to others or treats others in an abrasive manner will not be chosen to advance. People with a narrow, parochial view may make decisions that help their own unit prosper, but affect other units or the company negatively.

Those who are seen as willing to put their own welfare ahead of the company will not be selected for a high-level promotion.

In addition to these factors, there are six core selection factors which are keys for decision makers. These are the unwritten rules that guide executive promotions, including:

* Demonstrating strategic skills
* Building a strong management team
* Managing implementation
* Exhibiting the capacity for innovation and change
* Working across organizational boundaries
* Projecting executive presence

For all individuals, accurate and honest feedback is the key to understanding where they stand in relation to the unwritten rules. In most organizations, there are extensive discussions about a person’s skills and leadership potential, but the information is rarely passed on to the person being considered.

People and organizations avoid giving honest feedback because it is inherently subjective and intuitive, it may be seen as different from a consensus view, and it can demotivate a person if it is seen as negative. This view rests on the assumption that a person is unable to grow as needed and may become frustrated by this inability.

Anyone is encouraged to look to move into an executive position to confront any perceptions by asking people directly for feedback. The obvious starting point is a person’s current manager, but it also makes sense to go to the people at the highest levels who actually know the person’s work.

When asking for honest feedback, people need to listen actively without arguing or being defensive. They should get as many specifics as possible by following up with probing questions and end by asking for a summary of the one or two things that would help build confidence in decision makers.

Responding to feedback positively means working to change the perceptions of others even if those perceptions are unfair or untrue. A person can then make a plan for demonstrating the skills seen as lacking.

In some cases, a person may need to work in a different position within the company to change negative perceptions or even leave the company if it seems impossible to change decision makers’ views internally.

This article is based on the book “The Unwritten Rules.” The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

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Use ten-year forecasting to improve foresight and shape a vision for the future in order to get there early and win. Looking ten years ahead, one can see patterns more clearly, even if the details are still unclear.

Ideally a forecast should be far enough into the future to go beyond an organization’s normal planning horizon but not so far ahead that it becomes unbelievable or irrelevant. A forecast is a plausible, internally consistent view of what might happen, but it is not a prediction.

A good leader is prepared for an uncertain future and prepared to think the unthinkable. This means being able to hold future outcomes in mind without judging too early.

Sensing requires reflection to get beneath the surface reactions and see what is really going on. Problem solvers cut to the chase right away. Sense makers go slowly at first when dealing with dilemmas so they can go faster later.

Forecasting is a kind of mental fitness practice. The core methodologies are:
* Expert opinion aggregation. A systematic process for articulating and synthesizing expert opinions into a forecast.
* Expert workshops. Experts called together as part of a forecasting process.
* Content synthesis. Draws together expert forecasts.
* Historical analogy. Draws lessons from the past to avoid repeating old mistakes.
* Scenarios. Brings forecasts to life through stories.
* Survey research. Uses questionnaires or interviews to elicit attitudes about the future.
* Ethnology. Explores underlying culture and values.
* Visualization. Brings a forecast to life through pictures and art.
* Artifacts from the future. Hybrids of archeology and design that use imagined objects to bring a forecast to life.

The ten-year forecast developed by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) outlines the external forces that will shape the next decade, with an emphasis on dilemmas that are important for leaders to consider. It visualizes the global social and technological context within which leaders, workers, and organizations will be living ten years from now.

This article is based on the book “Get There Early.” The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

The integration perspective suggests that an organization has a single culture that is clearly identifiable and potentially measurable, and that employees are committed to supporting it (or at least going along with it).

The differentiation perspective sees organizations as complex, many-faceted sets of sub-cultures within one overarching culture, interacting to manage their diverse and often competing interests and objectives.

The fragmentation perspective emphasizes ambiguities of interpretation, irony, paradox, and irreconcilable contradictions that cross-cut, undermine, and confuse any organization-wide or sub-culture claims of consensus or clarity.

There is no value in taking a reductionist approach to defining corporate culture. It is not a phenomenon that can be reduced to a meaningful short label or a single agreed-upon definition.

Corporate culture is an organizationally specific experience felt both subjectively and individually by insiders and outsiders. An organization’s culture is not a “thing” where a label suffices to describe it, nor is it a set of discrete elements that can be easily manipulated either separately or together.

Across an organization, there is an overarching look and feel that is expressed differently but relatively predictably within business units. On a day-to-day basis, employees respond to whatever comes up within appropriate and culturally acceptable norms.

It is helpful to think of corporate culture as analogous to climate and weather — climate reflecting the more predictable pattern, applicable to the larger entity, and weather being chaotic and unpredictable. People living within a specific climate zone become familiar with the characteristic weather patterns and respond to the day-to-day variations in weather.

An organization’s culture is experienced in a similar way, and like the climate and weather, is simultaneously shaping and is shaped by the context. Over time it can and does change — whether by design or by default.

In the same way that people are conscious of the climate and the weather, they are conscious of corporate culture and make choices in relation to it. Thinking about corporate culture as analogous to climate, sub-climate, and weather helps explain why changing the culture is complex.

The author recommends these three approaches to defining corporate culture:
Be clear about what the company stands for, what its strategy is, and the way it practices its corporate values as events unfold.

Be culturally relevant in each market, adapting to local customs and traditions as appropriate.

Stay alert and respond to changes in the external culture.

This article is based on the book ‘Corporate Culture.’ The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

It has also been referred to in broader terms as a call for humanizing elements and audiences to link together in cyberspace, or simply as a collection of words, pictures, video, chatter, and audio on the Internet, commonly dedicated to experiences and opinions.

With such a variety of definitions it is difficult to deny the impact that social media has had on business. It has altered how consumers relate their buying experiences and share their product or service expertise and advice.

It has also changed how consumers expect businesses to show their appreciation, and vice versa. Social media has made it much easier for consumers of all kinds to seek and find information, while simultaneously presenting new challenges for businesses trying to enter or change a market.

Influencers are no longer contained within a small group of easily-identified advertisers or icons. Instead, they have become a democracy stretched out across all demographics, affecting not only marketing but also customer service, customer relationship management, public relations, and most other types of business communication.

Ultimately, this revolution of influence has made the marketing “message” obsolete. Consumers are not looking for a message, they are looking for a conversation, and many businesses find themselves woefully unprepared for this face of advertising.

When confronted with the new online reality, organizations have two primary choices:
1) they can either redirect funds to fundamentally alter how the business approaches its communication, or
2) they can deny the change and believe that traditional methods are effective enough.

Outright denial of the change is becoming more difficult; studies show that 70 percent of consumers obtain brand information not from traditional marketing methods, but from social networks.

Between 2009 and 2010, Twitter users numbered between 25 and 30 million. In late 2009, worldwide Facebook users grew to more than 350 million. Even MySpace, considered by many social media experts to be largely defunct, maintains a user base of over 260 million. YouTube is estimated to stream around seven billion videos each month. Technorati tracks at least 100 million blog posts.

Along with the evident shift to online arenas for information distribution, the terms used to describe the social network experience are also shifting. Words evolve, and the old terminology that businesses were using to describe their communication efforts have faded.

“Viral” and “Authenticity” have become overused and have lost their worth in the eyes of the consumer. Even terms like “Transparency” and “Relationships” have been commercialized to such an extent that they no longer matter. New social media tactics require new words, like “Believability,” “Participation,” and “Hearing” (as opposed to the less impactful “Listening”).

This article is based on the book “Engage!” The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Meeting leaders should write down and review the purpose of the meeting, then clearly and accurately communicate it, either visually or verbally with each guest. The essential questions conveners should ask themselves are:

What is this gathering all about?

What do the participants need to know to show up ready to fully participate?

What is our individual and collective purpose for this engagement, and what are we doing this work for?

Conveners should open a meeting or conversation by stating its purpose or intent (which should also be present in the invitation and agenda) and the desired goals or outcomes. One good way for meeting leaders to prepare for this is to write out the purpose then read it aloud to themselves, on video, or to a friend. This exercise can help a convener see areas that are likely to be misunderstood.

Some gatherings require a genesis story as well. This is a method of setting the context in which guests are given the history of how everyone came to be at the meeting.

Reviewing history gives the group a sense of connection and invites new members to imagine themselves as part of the whole. When participants feel like they are part of a group working toward a purpose, they will bring their full potential to the task.

If a gathering starts on the wrong track, conveners should recalibrate the meeting by asking questions and listening. Conveners should then restate the purpose and ask for feedback.

Another way to get the meeting on the right track is through transition exercises such as meditation, visualization, getting up to stretch, or breathing exercises.

This article is based on the book “The Art of Convening.” The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

• Persistent overcapacity
• Misallocation of institutional assets and resources
• Low payment rates
• Aggressive competition from physician-owned facilities
• The burden of uncompensated care

In response, many hospitals have focused on financial measures, such as mergers and affiliations, service expansions, and cost-cutting strategies, such as reduced length of stay. However, this focus on financial performance, along with a growing public perception that hospitals are error-prone environments, might be weakening public trust in hospitals as community institutions.

The results of an American Hospital Association (AHA) study in the late 1990s suggest that a substantial portion of the public believes hospitals are:

• Lacking individual identity, values, and mission
• Transformed from charitable institutions to purely business enterprises
• Impersonal and detached from the community
• Putting economics ahead of patient needs

These findings suggest that many hospitals have lost the trust of the communities they serve. At the same time, consumers are becoming better informed about hospital performance through the Internet and by reading pamphlets and brochures provided by their employers and health plans.

They are also financially motivated to act on that information. Many health insurance products feature higher deductibles and coinsurance rates, and they reward patients who choose to obtain treatment at hospitals that score well on quality, cost, and patient satisfaction metrics.

As a result, many hospitals are engaged in programs to improve their patient satisfaction scores and have increased their direct marketing to consumers. The emergence of consumerism in healthcare is forcing hospitals to reexamine their traditional organizational models and their cultures.

This article is based on the book “Reinventing the Patient Experience.” The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.