Lem Lasher is CSC’s Chief Innovation Officer. CSC is a global tech and business services company.
Background:
[These are my quick notes, complete with (what I hope is no more than) the occasional typo and grammatical error. Please excuse those. Thanks!
From time to time, I’ll insert my own editorial comments – exercising the prerogatives of the blogger. I’ll show those in brackets. ]
Notes:
- They have a corporate-wide office of innovation.
- They learned early that it is hard to get a good focus on innovation because there are many competing/diffuse definitions of innovation.
- Can’t just focus on idea creation. You also need the intellectual rigor and discipline to translate great ideas into practical business solutions and then deliver them.
- Four themes of their innovation strategy: leadership, process, governance, enablement.
- Paradox: really good management will kill innovation because good managers are trained to eliminate risk.
- Good managers shouldn’t focus on individual innovators; instead focus on creating a good environment for innovation.
- Look at innovation as part of an entire system — need to attend to innovators, customers, external partners
- They enable and facilitate — rather managing in a command-and-control way
- They focus on NEXT Practices rather than BEST practices
- He says that if you implement best practices you just as good as the next guy. BUT you need to be better.
- E2.0 has taken off in CSC, based on a Jive platform. Nearly 50% of the employees are active on it.
- Lem Lasher ended by announcing Clare Flanagan’s promotion. Nice!
Above and Beyond KM 