We are continuing with second day’s first session of the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit.  I want to once again thank The Rocket Company for allowing me to attend.  In an effort to help fulfill our mission of helping churches succeed, I will once again be bringing some of the top leadership lessons from the incredible faculty the WCA has assembled.

Vijay Govindarajan was the second speaker of the first session.  Vijay, interviewed by Jim Mellado, is ranked #3 on Thinkers 50 and was named one of the Top 10 Business School Professors in the world by Business Week.

  1. Strategy is not about celebrating the past, celebrating the present.  It is about leadership in the future.
  2. If you want to be a leader in the future you must change…Strategy is innovation.
  3. Manage the present.  Selectively forget the past.  Most companies focus on the present.
  4. Competition of the present is all about efficiency.  Competition of the future is all about innovation.  How do you create the future while managing the present with efficiency?
  5. When you are dominant in a practice, you develop a dominant logic in the organization…When left unchecked, dominant logic develops boundaries.  You can’t see new customers.  You can’t see new ideas.
  6. Innovation is not just ideas.  People mistake it as creativity.  Innovation is commercializing and executing creativity.
  7. Innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
  8. Innovation is Ideas + Execution.
  9. Idea + Leader + Team + Plan = Innovation
  10. Making innovation happen is not the responsibility of the leader.
  11. Innovation leaders have to be humble and work with beaurocracy.
  12. The two big innovation killers is the assumption that innovation can happen inside the performance engine.  The second is to not constitute the team and plan correctly.
  13. The innovation team must be dedicated, different and distinct from the performance engine team.  But linked to the performance engine team.
  14. Managing conflict is a measurement to the linkage of the innovation team and the performance team.
  15. When you start of innovation, the cash comes from the performance engine.  It will lose money today but it will create the future.
  16. The future is now.  The future is not what a company does in the future…It you want a tree five years from now, the work starts today.
  17. Be prepared to recruit people from the outside because you need new thinking.
  18. The innovation team fights against organizational memory…It must work with them because they need to borrow critical elements.
  19. Innovation is unmanageable chaos.
  20. Ongoing operations are predictable where innovation is not.
  21. Current business responds to clear signals…Innovation responds to weak signals because it bets on the future.
  22. The planning challenge for innovation is testing assumptions.  Spend a little, learn a lot because you have a lot of assumptions to test.  Low-cost experimentation.
  23. Judge innovation on the ability to learn.  Can you setup your hypothesis?  Can you setup low-cost experimentation?
  24. Reverse innovation is innovating in a poor country like India and selling them in a rich county like the U.S.
  25. We thought innovation value for money.  Innovation is about value for many.  You had to do a lot more for a lot less for a lot more people.
  26. I don’t know how you can do a poor quality heart surgery.
  27. Why don’t you use your innovation to produce great products for the poor?
  28. India has so many problems with so few resources.  India can only solve its problems through innovation.
  29. Teaching for me was the best way to have the highest leverage.
  30. I came to this country in the last 70s with $11 in my pocket.
  31. The essence of America is humility.

SystemsWebinar

Click here or the image provided to register for a FREE webinar  put on by The Rocket Company on August 20th where we will teach on creating and implementing healthy systems in your church.  Healthy systems are the #1 thing needed for your church to grow and reach its full redemptive potential.

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