The Creator’s Mindset

Lippincott
Jul 21, 2017 · 5 min read

This is a follow-up article to our report on the Customer of the Future.

How can a company be run that knows enough, moves fast enough, invents enough to keep up with the customer of the future, AND that outsmarts the ever-growing list of companies vying to displace it in their affections?

That’s the question every leadership team is pondering right now. They’re all scrambling to avoid becoming the next Blockbuster, Yellow Cab or Sears — and trying to do to other industries what Netflix, Uber and Amazon did to theirs. This is a particular concern for large, traditional corporations; but even for companies birthed in the digital age, the fear of falling afoul of natural selection is an everyday reality.

Although one can argue that change has always been a constant, and that companies have always had to evolve, let’s agree that there’s something about change today, this change, that’s uniquely confounding. It’s not only faster than ever before, it’s multidimensional. Technology is constantly moving the boundaries of products, services, attitudes, behaviors, politics, laws, regulations and economics. Not just in some markets, but in every market. Traditional command-and-control models designed to mitigate risks and drive efficiencies are proving to be ineffective. This change is different, and it’s either terrifying or tremendously exciting, depending on one’s mindset.

A lot has been said about what leaders have to do to survive in a world in which technology has permeated every aspect of life. But this article is different. It’s not about what the leader has to be. It’s about who the leader has to be and, more specifically, how the leader has to think. Because the transformation of an organization with tens even hundreds of thousands of employees starts with a few brave leaders ready to make a mindset shift.

The Creator’s Mindset

This mindset isn’t about what the leader does, it’s about what the company is about. We’ve studied and worked with myriad companies who are thriving today — some Old Economy household names like GE and Goldman Sachs, some aggressive digital upstarts like LinkedIn — and we’ve found that they share a distinct mindset that has propelled them to leadership positions in their respective sectors.

We call this way of being the Creator’s Mindset. It’s a culture code that ensures they will be delivering value for customers for generations to come. They embrace it as a way of leading, a way of managing teams, and a way of running programs. Because of it they will thrive through, not succumb to, the immutable law of natural selection.

The Creator’s Mindset has three very specific characteristics focused on the creation of value for the customer of the future.

1. Fuel innovation through open sensing
To innovate and create new value, sensing and solving problems in an environment where opinions and information are readily solicited and shared is key. Companies that facilitate open sensing are driven by data and learning. They embrace transparency and new information. They use integrated systems to put operational and performance information at managers’ disposal via mobile apps. To be great at sensing, they ensure teams are truly open in terms of a perpetual ability to absorb influences and input from diverse sources. They appreciate diversity as the wellspring of creativity and new value.

GE did this when it migrated 300,000 employees to Colab, a global collaboration platform designed, among other things, to put material innovations discovered by aerospace engineers into the hands of people in its appliances business. The platform opens up internal conversations to suppliers and customers so that the company can be responsive to the needs of the market. In this way, customer data becomes vital to business decisions, not a measure of success. Southwest Airlines does the same by sharing customer satisfaction scores across its facilities, as does Amazon.

For GE, the result was a transformative platform like Predix, the highly successful, cloud-based platform that helps companies build applications for the Internet of Things. For others, it’s the extraordinarily loyal, forgiving, emotionally engaged clientele who will stick with the company even when it’s not perfect.

2. Galvanize employees with inspiring ambition
To galvanize people in this time of rapid change, leaders have to provide clarity and purpose.

They need to explain why their enterprise exists and why people should care to join and stay. This is both an old skill, with great communication being statistically the most appreciated aspect of a beloved manager, and a newly important one. Best of luck to any company whose millennial workforce doesn’t have a sense of purpose and doesn’t believe in what it’s doing.

An inspiring ambition not only instills confidence, it serves as a touchstone for effectively channeling the energy of an organization into keeping pace with consumers’ ready embrace of the new and disruptive. Again, GE is a great case in point. GE’s managers, rigorously trained at Crotonville, ensure that great leadership is decentralized. As many have discovered, in every industry, the promotion of employees who have only functional or technical expertise is a recipe for silo thinking and the disenfranchisement of talent. GE’s managerial excellence helps its people stay focused on the mission ahead even as the company shifts into uncharted territory.

3. Make adaptive co-creation part of the company’s DNA
Iteration has clearly won out over perfectionism. Compressed launch cycles, expedited piloting and rapid prototyping require teams to become highly fluid and committed to learning by forming to solve a problem, sharing lessons from their successes and failures, then disbanding. MIT Media Lab says it best: “Demo or die.” The fastest way to great is through multiple rounds of “good enough.”

Adaptive co-creation taps into an organization’s collective intelligence and encourages a willingness to embrace vulnerability and accept mistakes. To achieve this, groups should be project focused and interdisciplinary, using design thinking to attack tasks from every angle.

Groups should also be supported by cloud-based systems, content and tools that are fully integrated to support anytime, anywhere co-creation.

Leaders and managers that adopt the Creator’s Mindset aren’t afraid to fail. They anticipate rather than react to customers’ needs. They swap silos for fluid, interdisciplinary problem-solving. They prefer transparency to secrecy, however vulnerable that may make them feel. They energize and empower tomorrow’s teams — full-timers, part-timers, gig workers and crowds — to envision solutions to problems whose outlines are not yet in focus.

For companies and leaders, sparking a human ambition and the capacity to continually create new sources of value will be the defining characteristic of successful leadership — and a Creator’s Mindset — in the decades to come.

Read more about the Customer of the Future.

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Lippincott

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We are creative consultants specializing in brand, innovation and experience design. https://lippincott.com

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