Companies are facing multiple challenges and one thing is clear, innovation is a piece of the solution. But what does it take to build a truly innovative organisation? In this video Harvard Business School’s Dr Linda Hill and Morgan Stanley’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Audrey Choi, discuss how successful leadership can lead to breakthrough thinking.
Linda this year has presented such a remarkable confluence of challenges the pandemic climate change social justice reckonings we’re trying to tackle these immense problems clearly innovation is a piece of the solution but what do we need to do as leaders to really develop an innovation-ready culture so if we’re going to build innovative organizations what we
Need to do is rethink leadership leadership is not about you having the answer or the vision and saying to people i have the vision communicating that vision and getting them to follow you it really is about a process of co-creation people aren’t going to follow you to the future they’re going to co-create it with you because you don’t know it all you actually
Need to develop an organization that has a culture and the capabilities required to truly collaborate which means knowing how to have a good fight because when you have those diverse points of view diverse expertise people are not going to have the same notion of how to get it done many leaders are much more comfortable dealing with conflict one-on-one but
They don’t know how to bring the conflict into the group so that we can all wrestle with it combine ideas as we do that even ideas that were maybe conflictual initially those are usually the innovative solutions what’s really challenged us to redefine innovation yes that it’s not in a petri dish only but it’s really about thinking about these systems yeah an
Innovation is something that’s new and useful if you can’t implement it if you can’t execute it and get it done you know it stays in the petri dish so i believe in basic research we need that obviously but in the end you need leaders who know how to work with the people who do the basic research then you have to figure out how you’re going to get it to the people
To make their lives better when we’re trying to build more sustainable economies and deal with esg kinds of goals all of those problems are really cross discipline right and what we see is if you want to address them at scale and in a sustainable way you’ve got to really build out that ecosystem we need t-shaped leaders who are very deep about their particular
Function or expertise but they have to be broad enough across the top so that they can collaborate and bridge and translate and work with others who have other expertise what do you see as best practice out there because leadership certainly matters i think it is really leaders who have started to understand that environmental issues social issues governance
Issues are not extra financial right they’re not the rounding out they’re not the sort of the lovely enhancements that they’re actually material to business at the institute for sustainable investing we’ve started to do more and more of the analysis around the corporation all the things that a corporation impacts whether that be your products your people your
Supply chain and how those things that aren’t on the traditional balance sheet how they actually affect returns and we are seeing that the leadership and the companies that really understand that interconnection that they actually are doing better and then from investors i think we’re also starting to see that those are more and more material concerns what is
The role of innovation in closing the gap in addressing these sustainability problems i think that we really need both kinds of innovation i like to think about platonic innovation which is that eureka moment when something new is actually created giving you a brand new tool that you never had before but the other that’s incredibly powerful especially for speed
And scale is what i often call secular innovation it’s taking things we already have and putting them together in different ways redefining business processes just rethinking how we do it so we get to a different outcome this past 18 months has been such a wake-up call that we finally have people really at every level of organization across every industry and
Sector saying we have to find a different solution one of the things that i’m really excited about is the morgan stanley sustainable solutions collaborative where we’re actually seeking out the breakthrough thinkers that think in that system’s way and think how can we really put together a solution that if we can bring together these different parties these
Different perspectives and scale it we can really make a difference what makes you hopeful i think that generation z and the millennials they are very focused on sustainability there is no patience and they are going to push and pull us to the future
Transcribed from video
Why leaders shouldn't shy away from conflict | Moral Money By Financial Times
