Case Study 5 (IDEO)

1.One of the most important aspects of effective strategic leadership is managing creativity and innovation. They are the golden keys for the organizational success. The highly competitive nature of today’s business needs creative and innovative ideas for dominant success. If you want to be strategic leader you have to think differently, so you could explore new ideas, or doing things in different, better way. Only if you think differently you will be able to uncover barriers and explore new ways how to become an effective strategic leader.

source: www.giraffeinnovation.com

2.There are many things we can learn from IDEO about effective strategic leadership:

Build culture, make working space fun, open to encourage creativity. Employ people from different areas so you could have different opinions and so you could learn from each other. Every employee should know why is he/she there for. Be flexible, and go out and see what people have to say, listen them and use it to find solution, don’t give titles- everyone should be the same, no judging just say your wild ideas, ask forgiveness not permission, don’t be afraid to disagree with people, etc...

3.Very important difference between this and challenger case study is that here we can see flat hierarchy opposite of NASA which has high hierarchy. In Challenger shuttle case employees were distant, didn’t communicate face to face, and when they were communicating it was very formal, unlike the IDEO where the communication is one of the main reasons of their success. NASA’s second space shuttle orbiter ‘Challenger’ experienced catastrophe because no one in NASA and Morton Thiokol(US corporation contracted by NASA) wanted to confront, unlike the IDEO where disagreeing with people is accepted, even more it is desirable.

There are very big similarities between IDEO and Madonna since both of them encourage creativity and innovation in order to remain competitive. Madonna knows that creativity and innovation are the lifeblood of her ‘existence’ as a pop star. Creativity helped her to explore  new ideas  which made her unique, different and superior from other musicians.