Organizations With High Levels Of Spark

Leading at Light Speed is a groundbreaking leadership book by Eric Douglas describing the 10 Quantum Leaps which build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization.

What is spark? By spark, I mean inspiring people to innovate and create.

It’s easy to spot an organization that has high levels of spark:

• People feel free to challenge the status quo.
• Going farther than what is expected by workers is the current norm for company employees.
• People feel their work is fun.
• People feel unconstrained by rank or hierarchy to suggest improvements.
• Ideas communicated openly about improvement of a company can be shared by people.”

3M is a good example of a company that focuses on trust and spark. Its “15 percent rule” enables employees to spend 15 percent of their work time exploring and conducting experiments. Tech people can freely apply for corporate funds for innovative programs they see fit to develop. Necessity is the mother of innovation and nurturing it has precisely created such things as Thinsulate and ScotchGard.

Fred Smith

Fred Smith, founder and CEO of Federal Express, “We hammer home that not to change is to be in the process of dying, of not meeting the market as it is. People who promote positive change are encouraged. We don’t hang people who try something new that doesn’t work out, because that’s the easiest way to ossify an organization – to crucify the people who are trying to innovate.”

Steve Jobs

By now, nearly everyone is familiar with the story of how two young men named Steve – Wozniak and Jobs – pretty much created the personal computer industry. Today Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Computer, still puts a premium on fun, creativity, learning, and exploring new ideas: “Learning about new technologies and markets is what makes this fun for me,” Jobs says. “You just gotta go learn this stuff. If you’re smart, you’ll figure it out.”

Walt Disney

Spark thrives in an environment of freedom, where the unexpected is invited, embraced, and encouraged to evolve into value. Knowing the concepts inside and out is the level of deep understanding Walt Disney had for it. Long before Mickey Mouse came along, he injected creativity into his team of animators. He wasn’t content to have silent cartoons: he wanted to produce the first cartoons with sound. He wasn’t content with black and white: he wanted color. The people who worked with Disney often remarked on the freedom he gave them to try new things – and they drew on the culture he built to come up with their own dazzling creations.

Google

One of the best examples of spark is Google. Ten years prior to this day, the company’s status was on a chart of nonexistence. Today, new innovations influence everything from advertising and media to geo-science, disease control, and climate prediction. In the next several years, I predict that Google’s innovations will enable your refrigerator to communicate your shopping list directly to the grocery store; guide your car as it navigates down the highway; and convert your home into a mini-generating plant. Invention by Google of profit and non-profit concepts interacting has placed a progressive, new business on the forefront of  internet markets. Operations performed at the speed of light has restructured a great amount of what we accomplish.

Spark isn’t limited to the private sector. Ted Gaebler, co-author of “Reinventing Government,” sees innovation as one of government’s most important missions: “We need to start engaging public employees’ whole brains,” he says, “not just the expenditure control half. We need to engage the entrepreneurial brain as well.”

Is your organization implementing the practices of high performing organizations? Find out with this free work survey.