Showing results by author "Matt D.M. Watson" in All Categories

The excitement of becoming an entrepreneur and starting a new business has faded. Your first dollar of revenue has been earned and quickly reinvested. Now, you are in the thick of the battle. This is where winning means making payroll for the month and losing means the bank foreclosing on your house. Maybe a professor talked you into running your own business. Or maybe you grew tired of serving in corporate America and working for underwhelming talent.

We humans crave security. Yet, continual change and adaptation are the lifeblood of a company. Keeping an organization competitive and relevant means regular change, thus shattering the sense of security people have with their jobs and their livelihoods. It’s no wonder people resist change. No matter a global corporation or small business, change is often "done" to a voiceless workforce.

The era of process management is fading away, and the age of innovation is upon us. This is ushering in the era of knowledge creation where the goal of organizations is to discover how to find and take advantage of new value in the market. However, people are products of their environment. The culture that you have built for your organization is either stimulating creative thought or stunting it. Facilitating Innovation explains how the leader impacts the environment and describes the best practices of building a creative culture.

Olympic athletes structure their lives for a single moment of intense competition. They train relentlessly, they eat intentionally, and their daily actions are focused on producing the optimal effort for a single moment in time. Why don’t organizations take this same approach with their employees? The goal of any leader is to get the optimal effort out of their team, therefore the leader’s focus must be on creating the ideal conditions for their team.