Inspire employees. The other part of it is that you do need to inspire people. It goes back to vision. You need to inspire people about the good that will come from innovation.
If you’re going to go through this period of uncertainty and risk, the only reason you’re going to do that is if you think there’s going to be some good at the end of that process. Otherwise, why the heck would you do that?
Helping people see the positive side of things and what can be is really important, and helping them think about that is really important. Just getting people excited about what could be better.
One of the things we do, this is a subtlety I heard from somebody else years ago. I remember a guy speaking at a talk about managing his company and how he took over a company that was really not doing very well and he ultimately turned it into quite a successful company. He said that one of the things they did in the beginning was they banished the word ‘problem’ from their vocabulary. They substituted in for the ‘problem’ just the word ‘opportunity.’
It just made so much sense. Every problem is actually an opportunity to improve something. It’s where to look to make improvement.
If something is working fine, that’s probably not as much of an opportunity to innovate as where there’s a problem, so flipping those around and saying those aren’t problems, those are opportunities for improvements, as we call them now.
(It’s a) simple kind of mind game, but it’s really reflective. Making that shift is really huge.
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