By Jeff De Cagna
There is widespread agreement among authors, consultants and thinkers in the ield of management
that innovation is the central capability for all organizations interested in maximizing their oppor-
tunities for success in the 21st century. While the pursuit of innovation cannot absolutely guarantee
meaningful growth, it is the best strategy most enterprises have for achieving it in a way that can
become sustainable over time.
Still, there are some leaders in organizations who push back on this fundamental premise, and ask
why they need to bother with innovation. After all, if their customers aren’t demanding it, and
if already limited staff and resources are stretched too thin by existing priorities, doesn’t it make
more sense to simply stick to organizational knitting and do the best they can with what have?
They argue that this approach would certainly be easier, much less risky and much less uncomfortable
for everyone concerned. Why do organizations need to innovate?
The answer to this basic question should be apparent to anyone paying attention to what is happen-
ing in our world right now. We live in a new world, with new rules that demand new responses.
Contrary to what some leaders believe, we do not live in a time of simple linear change. Rather,
we are in the middle of the earliest stages of what I sometimes describe as profound, accelerating
and intensifying disruption and discontinuity, i.e., a genuine paradigm shift. Don’t like risk and
discomfort? That’s too bad, because there is an ample supply of both, and that supply will only grow
going forward.
As the powerful forces of demographic, economic, scientiic, social, political and
technological shifts continue to converge, their cumulative impact will recalibrate our society in ways
that eventually will make it unrecognizable. We are situated in a brand new context, one in which
doing more of what we’ve always done simply will not work. The acute challenges created by the
paradigm shift all organizations must face demand that leaders at all levels get serious about think-
ing, acting and learning like true innovators right away.
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