Strategic Innovation: 10 Business Rules Applied to Career Wellbeing
Posted by Joe Antle on December 31, 2019 1:20 PM EST

After taking a quick look at Chip Block's blog from New Year's Even 2019, it became clear that the idea of tying business success lessons to creating sustainable career rejuvenations may make sense......
...especially when you consider the rather interesting linkage between business or organizational success sustainability as expressed in Jim Collin's books AND lengthening and strengthening careers of all workers, not just older ones. And if you also add a dimension of one of our favored topics, applied innovation, then you end up with a somewhat rare formula.
However, I'm suggesting here that there are also applicable lessons from strategic innovation to career wellbeing and rejuvenation. Unlike Chip's blog, I'm focusing the concept on career wellbeing for all professionals versus only those who are "of age". Thus, in the spirit of Chip's last blog post's model and using the idea of "ten lessons" I decided to try to one-up Chip with a follow-on blog post based on lessons from another early 2000's book, "Ten Rules for Strategic Innovation", written by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble and published in 2005 by Harvard Business Schools Press.
Rule 1: In all great sucess stories, the great idea is only Chapter 1.
Rule 2: Sources of organizational memory are powerful.
Rule 3: Large, established companies can beat start-ups.
Rule 4: Strategic experiments face critical unknowns.
Rule 5: The NewCo organization must be built from scratch
Rule 6: Managing tensions is job one for management.
Rule 7: NewCo needs its own planning and operational processes.
Rule 8: Interest, influence, internal competition and politics disrupt.
Rule 9: Hold NewCo accountable for learning and not only results.
Rule 10: Companies can build a capacity for breakthrough growth through strategic innovation.
Now, simply substitute the words "you" and "yourself" for organizations and companies and you will have some excellent guidelines for applying the ten rules of strategic innovators to your career reinvention.