The Innovative Leader: Step-by-Step Lessons from Top Innovators for Your Organization
Stephen Wunker, Jennifer Lud Lawe, and Hari Nair
Morgan James Publishing (April 2024)

Creativity produces what is new. Innovation produces what is better. We need both.

Here are three key questions:

#1: What are the ABCs of innovative leadership?
#2: Which myths about innovation need to be debunked? What in fact is true?
#3: What is the step-by-step process by which to develop an innovative leader?

Stephen Wunker, Jennifer Lud Lawe, and Hari Nair added to their own wide and deep business experience by interviewing 50 innovative leaders in order to answer these three questions. They provide an abundance of information, insights, and counsel in their book. Whatever their size and nature may be, all organizations need innovative leadership at all levels and in all areas within the given enterprise. That is why this book is a “must read.”

These are among the passages of special interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the nature and extent of Wunker, Lawe, and Nair’s coverage:

o Step 1: Create Your Leadership Style (Pges 3-26)
o Step 2: Aspire (29-39)
o Case study: Solving specific problems (46-49)
o Step 3: Build (51-75)
o Case study: Two approaches to innovation (72-74)

o Step 4: Cultivate (77-100)
o A Culture of Innovation (103-112)
o Assurance (107-110)
o Troubleshooting Obstacles (117-121)
o Extended Case Study: ABC in practice (123-129)

o Advice for Special Roles (133-151)
o Overview of Key Innovative Activities (155-164)
o Sustained commitments (169-182)
o Tools for the ABCs of innovative leadership (183-184)
o Innovation Aspiration Worksheet (185-189)

o Innovation Archetypes Worksheet (189-192)
o 20 Top Innovation Metrics (193-195)
o Troubleshooting Guide for Common Innovation Pitfalls (197-199)
o Diagnostic Surveys (201-203)
o Audit of Your Organization’s Innovativeness (205-209)

I commend Stephen Wunker, Jennifer Lud Lawe, and Hari Nair on the invaluable material they provide, and, on the innovative process by which they organize and present it. The business world today is more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall. Hence the compelling value of this book.

I wholly agree with Marshall Goldsmith that what got companies and their leaders to where they are now won’t get them to where they want to be in months and years to come. In fact, I am convinced that what got them here won’t even allow them to remain here, however and wherever “here” and “there” are defined.

* * *

In school, college, and then graduate school, I learned more and learned it faster when I discussed material in a group with 3-5 others taking the same course. I also recorded key Q&As on 3×5 file cards (based on course material, whatever the subject) with a Q on one side and the A on the other, held together by a thick rubber band. I carried them with me and reviewed the content whenever I had a few minutes to kill.

Here are two other suggestions to keep in mind while reading The Innovative Leader: Highlight key passages, and, perhaps in a lined notebook kept near at hand, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines) in “What You Can Do” exercises, page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to key points posed within the narrative. Also record your responses to specific questions implied if not posed, especially at the conclusion of chapters.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.