Every company needs good ideas. Business is changing faster than ever, and without the next new idea, your company will fall behind. Successful leaders know this.
Harvard’s John Kotter—an authority on leadership and change—notes, “The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades.”
Be at the forefront of that rapid change. The key to success is contributing something valuable that helps your organization succeed. So let’s first look four different ways ideas affect companies…
- Lucky Break. This takes a horrible idea and pairs it with poor communication skills. It is a lucky break for a company that doesn’t implement bad ideas! For example, do you think anchovy-flavored milk is a good idea? Probably not. It would be quite a challenge for someone to communicate powerfully enough to convince others to bring it to market!
- Wasted Investment. This refers to people who may be fantastic communicators, but are at times a bit arrogant and big-headed. Everyone trusts them, as they vividly detail plans and rally everyone to believe and implement their ideas. The problem is idea quality. New Coke, introduced in 1985, is a perfect example of a wasted investment. Coca-Cola, amid much publicity, attempted to change its formula to respond to its commercial competitor, Pepsi. This reformulation caused the company to return to the old formula under the name Coca-Cola Classic only three months later.
- Wasted Opportunity. This group includes people with great ideas that rarely make it to market. I was once part of this group. However, as a leader in a Fortune 50 company, I developed Fast Track Tools to capture the best ideas from everyone around me in the company. I took the wasted opportunities I saw around me and turned them into successes.
- Success. This is comprised of distinguished companies, as well as the people who move great ideas into action. Who could argue that the billion-dollar consumer product, the iPod, is a success? The hand-held device, which contains more computing power than an early Macintosh, was put together in 2001 by hardware designers led by Tony Fadell, a young engineer who had worked at the Apple spinoff, General Magic. It was an awesome idea and Tony was convinced this would be a game changer for Apple. He communicated this message to everyone, making it a HUGE SUCCESS.
The best ideas infect people, just like a jingle you cannot get out of your head. This requires honing your skills to ensure your ideas are solid AND that you can communicate them in way that sticks in everyone’s mind, like that perfect jingle.
Developing communication skills marked for success takes practice. To help you fine-tune your communications, stay tuned for future posts in the Communicate to Win series focusing on problem solving and delivering your message with clarity.