At the Dental Trade Alliance Meeting last month I listened to Ram Charan, highly-sought after consultant to Fortune 500 CEOs and co-author of Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, talk about converting ideas into innovation. In every company I've ever worked or with which I've been associated, we have never lacked for great ideas. However, we have always been slower than we wanted at turning those ideas into tangible and value-added innovation. Ram addresses this problem, which seems to be present in most companies, with a story about Steve Jobs...I'll attempt to paraphrase it.
One of the times Steve Jobs returned to
The next time you find yourself pontificating on all of your and your company's great ideas, stop and ask yourself who in your organization has the leadership, vision, and execution skills to actually make those ideas a reality. Instead of focusing on trying to develop ideas with little hope of being anything, it's probably better to focus on hiring,