Author: Inder Sidhu Date: June 4, 2010 Source: Forbes.com URL: http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/innovation-cisco-disruptive-sustaining… Innovation: An effective innovation strategy requires both a commitment to sustaining innovation and a commitment to disruptive innovation, according to Cisco’s Inder Sidhu in the Forbes article “The Two-Pronged Approach To Innovation Your Company Needs.” Avoiding a tradeoff between sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation is a challenge that all companies face. Fortune 500 companies, very mindful of their accountability to customers and shareholders, tend to invest fewer resources in disruptive innovation. Start-ups, on the other hand, focus most of their resources on disruptive innovation. The key to successful innovation is to consciously pursue both types, as the amplification of the combination is significant.
Author: Beth Tener, www.ndcollaborative.com
Consider these scenarios:
- Every hotel could adopt greener practices, such as saving water, reducing energy use, serving food from local farms in its restaurants – and many leaders already have. How do we get the rest of the hotels to learn from the leaders and adopt these innovations?
- Buildings are responsible for about one-third of energy use in the US and their construction consumes large amounts of resources and generates considerable waste. How could we redesign how buildings are built and operated to greatly reduce these impacts? This is not an easy task when you consider how many ‘players’ are involved, such as architects, building owners, builders, and construction material suppliers to name a few.
- In the non-profit sector, thousands of organizations are working on various aspects of environmental protection and social justice. How could their work be aligned to enhance their impact?
These scenarios represent the type of actions needed to achieve sustainability. In each case, to make progress, we need to work across organizational boundaries. Collaborating in networks is imperative to achieve the scale of transformation required to make our organizations, communities, and ecosystems sustainable.
Author: Bruce Hoppe
Source: http://connectedness.blogspot.com
Date: 6/4/2010
The Leadership Learning Community is hosting an interesting conversation on network leadership. As part of that dialogue, Claire Reinelt put to me the question, "What does leadership look like in a healthy network?"
In response, I turn to The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu. This ancient Chinese book of wisdom has inspired many translators to describe leaders and leadership of healthy networks. A few examples are below.
We often think of leadership as the skills, qualities and behavior of an individual who exerts influence over others to take action or achieves a goal using their position and authority. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that this is only one part of the leadership story – and one that does not fully recognize leadership as a relational process that is fluid, dynamic, non-directive and non-unilateral. Understanding leadership as a collective process requires us to think differently about how change occurs and what leadership is, how it works and how we can support it.
Traditional approaches to leadership and leadership development assume that training an individual leader with appropriate knowledge and skills will result in an increase of organizational capacity which in turn will lead to better community results.
Date:
In 2009, the Hunt Alternatives Fund hired the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) to conduct a retrospective evaluation of its social movement leadership program, Prime Movers.
By Claire Reinelt
(Article originally posted on Stanford Social Innovation Review Opinion Blog)
Whether we seek to eliminate health disparities or prepare all children to enter school ready to learn, we do not have the leadership we need. The heroic model of leadership blinds us to the fact that untapped leadership potential exists everywhere. The dominant leadership model assumes that training individuals will better prepare them to lead strong organizations; and in turn strong organizations will produce better community-level results, but this model falls well short. Reaching the scale and scope of leadership needed to address complex issues requires new approaches to leadership development. Our focus should be on finding, cultivating, and connecting leadership everywhere it exists; across all generations, races, communities, and organizational levels. To activate this untapped leadership potential, leadership thinking and practice need to shift in three fundamental directions:
Networks are effective ways of sharing information, communicating and collaborating. They are flexible and adaptable, morphing in response to the people involved and the task at hand. They are dynamic by nature and have the potential to produce lasting effects. We believe that if we focus the energy of networks, and spark connections, we can accomplish unprecedented results in the social sector. Technology elevates the potential and impact of networks, making it an intrinsic element of our discussion on network leadership.
Increasingly, groups of people are using technology to go beyond connection and information sharing into collaborative action, typically in response to crises. These are some examples of how technology is bringing down barriers of location and time, optimizing the communication flow, and nurturing innovation and creativity.
As part as the Leadership for a New Era collaborative research initiative, we are currently working with our partners to produce some content for the Leadership and Networks publication. We have a great series of blog articles planned over the next couple of weeks: As we post the articles, we encourage you to suggest additional ideas and questions that you want to explore though this initiative. Check out the site and share your ideas!
For the May Member Spotlight we would like to illuminate the work of Bruce Hoppe and Connective Associates. As both founder and president of Connective Associates, Bruce works with communities and organizations to better visualize and use their social networks for innovation, influence, and social good. His blog Connectedness is a rich source of links and reflections on networks and web science.
Bruce has pioneered the use social network analysis in the leadership development field. At Creating Space VII in Durham, NC, Bruce introduced the LLC community to a social network mapping tool that used real-time data from the participants to map their relationships with each other. These maps enabled the group to analyze the patterns of their connections and consider when network maps are useful in leadership development work.
On Networks…
-
A new paper, “Disrupting Philanthropy: Technology and the Future of the Social Sector,” by Lucy Bernholz, Edward Skloot and Barry Varela examines the effects of information networking on grant-making strategies of institutional fundors. The paper is based on the premise that “information networks are transforming philanthropy." It explores four practices of philanthropy that information networking has impacted: setting goals and formulating strategy, building social capital, measuring progress, measuring outcomes and impact, and accounting for the work. Additionally, it looks at what information networks offer for the future of philanthropy.