5 Ways Successful Entrepreneurs Achieve Breakthrough Business

Fostering innovation requires a different mindset. Organizations have a tendency to stifle ideas and kill creativity. Fortunately, there a few simple steps you can take to get the creative juices flowing again and generate breakthrough ideas.

Today’s post is by Dr. Liz Alexander.

Just as bass gobble up minnows, big companies swallow small ones. One of the main reasons being that they desire the Holy Grail of innovation. Something the vast majority of CEOs, when surveyed, say is a key lever of growth and hence crucial to their sustainable success. No problem if you’re Google or Apple with billions to spend on “disrupters.” Or if you’re still a start-up.

But your business may have reached a point where you’re too small to afford to acquire breakthrough thinking, but big enough to have morphed into something more conservative, consensus seeking, even too comfortable for your own good. All those processes you put in place to help everything run smoothly have created a kind of “regression to the mean.” In other words, your focus on managing toward the middle has pushed entrepreneurial thinking out the door.

Yet that’s not an absolute. Of the 30 “most transformative innovations” since the 1970s, as identified by the Wharton School of Business, the majority—including fiber optics, handheld mobile phones, liquid-crystal displays and digital photography—were invented by employees. But as shown by that last example (rejected by Kodak, see #1 below), it takes a certain willingness by leadership to both nurture and appreciate their efforts.

Below are five practices or, to be more accurate, mindsets common to the entrepreneurs I’ve known. Not only through my professional involvement, but also as someone who left corporate life 30 years ago to “do my own thing,” because the culture was crushing my creativity. Which do you recognize?

1. They swear off the “curse of expertise”

Kodak. Blockbuster. Woolworth. All companies that knew what their market wanted, knew their business, knew that nothing was going to change. Until it did—and they went out of business. One thing I’ve always admired about entrepreneurs is their open-minded approach to problem solving. They achieve that by not going into solution mode too quickly. In other words, entrepreneurial minds spend more time making sure they’re focused on the right problem. They don’t fool themselves that they’re “experts,” because these days—with everything shifting so rapidly—who really is?

2. They’re cross-functional

No one can afford to get too hung up on their job titles and defined functional roles in start-ups. There’s too much to be done; too many hands needed on deck. And there’s a huge advantage to that flexibility in terms of stimulating creativity. Something Cisco benefited from, according to this HBR article, when it saw its business grow “about 80% per year for five years following introduction” of a cross-functional strategy. Such an approach helps cross-pollinate ideas and new perspectives when engineers are not just allowed but required to mingle with marketing, and other typically siloed talent.

3. They “kill their darlings”

As a professional writer almost since the day I learned to pick up a pen, I know the value of stripping my work of lines I love to make an article more readable and compelling. Unfortunately, senior management often has a problem with their “darlings,” and woe betide anyone who tells them otherwise. That was the case in one organization I consulted with recently to help some of their senior team discover and develop potential thought leadership projects. Except one of the ideas we hit upon directly contradicted a directive from the top. Guess who was “right” and wouldn’t budge? Goodbye brilliant thought leadership concept!

4. They’re patient

One of the most fascinating things I learned while researching my latest book, FOUND: Transforming Your Unlimited Ideas into One Sustainable Business was that the ideas our entrepreneurial case studies started out with rarely, if ever, were foundational to their eventual business. And those founders were prepared to wait until they got it right before launching.

When Rajeev Pathak decided to apply his skills and experience to improving education in India, for example, he came up with half a dozen or more ideas. But after conducting research to validate each of them, including speaking to the market he intended to serve (K-12), Rajeev discovered that none would provide the solution to the core challenge schools have: to give each student individual attention. After iterating on this problem, he developed the world’s first intelligent and adaptive web-based product, ‘funtoot.’

But, then, entrepreneurs know that changing the world isn’t something you achieve in a quarter (or, worse, every quarter)!

5. They’d rather do something than meet about it

The last time I was employed—(I thought I’d try it out again—neh!)—I worked in a division where every team member was required to attend a Monday morning meeting.  Like, every Monday morning at 9am. To “be a team,” talk about what we were planning to do for the rest of the week, drink coffee and eat donuts. My question “why?” did not go down well. Frankly, I’d rather get on with work than talk about it.

Here’s the problem with meetings from the perspective of Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator:

“When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”

You know what I would have liked? For the manager to have asked each “maker” just how productive these meetings were for us, and whether we felt there was any real benefit to us.

Did that happen? No. Just more meetings. Which is why I took my entrepreneurial mind back home and continue to work for myself!

I’m seeing more and more articles talk about how digital transformation, among other things means the demand for “intrapreneurs” (entrepreneurs working within enterprises) will outstrip the supply. Something needs to change. And it’s a mistake to ask these invaluable creative thinkers to do so.

I wonder how far corporate America will be willing to shift its thinking (and entrenched cultures) instead?

Thoughts?

– Dr. Liz Alexander is a globally experienced ideation specialist who works with individuals and organizations to discover and develop “white space” opportunities that establish competitive differentiation. Many go on to hire her to help communicate those ideas through business books and robust thought leadership initiatives. Liz is the multiple awards-winning author of 18 nonfiction titles whose sales exceed one million copies in over 20 countries worldwide. FOUND: Transforming Your Unlimited Ideas into One Sustainable Business, is her 17^th book.

Want to learn more about leading innovation at your company? Join us at Executive Insight 16 in New York! CLICK HERE to learn more about the event.

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Photo: Breakthrough by Brian Fuller