Why Your Firm Needs New Ideas
Source: CPA Success
The following includes experts, reproduced with permission, from a blog entry by Tom Hood.
Is innovation important? Why is it coming up so frequently in conversations?
The challenge for leaders is to be able to keep one eye on the present, pushing the current business to its highest potential, and the other eye on the horizon, placing careful bets on the future.
That is why I loved the latest edition of FastCompany magazine and its focus on the World's 50 Most Innovative Companies.
What they say it takes to be a top innovator:
- They are willing to scrap conventional ideas.
- They are willing to fail.
- They know what they stand for (vision, culture and values).
The world's top five innovators, according to FastCompany:
- Apple
- Nissan
- Groupon
Listen to the advice of Rita McGrath, co-author of a great book for CPAs thinking about innovation titled "Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity."
“Think of it a bit like momentum,” said McGrath, a professor at the Columbia Business School in New York and a renowned thought leader on strategy in volatile and uncertain environments. “If you start a race from a dead stop, you're much less likely to get up to speed fast than someone who's already moving. With growth, you have a similar phenomenon.
“Plus, it's more fun,” she added. “It's more fun for your people; it's more fun for you to be thinking of doing something new rather than the same old thing. Once you're focused on growth, people start to see opportunities more readily because they're actively thinking about it.”
That's an excerpt from “Can't Afford to Grow? You Can't Afford Not To.”
For the complete blog post, read “Do you have what it takes to innovate?”
From CPA Success, the blog of the Maryland Association of CPAs, http://www.cpasuccess.com, February 25, 2011.