Leadership, strategy, and innovation are the three elements working together to advance our world

by David Holt

For something to capture your fancy, it has to suit your taste and also work well. There's no accounting for taste, but function is easier to judge—whether it's a recipe, a technology, a sports team, a company, even a global empire. By the time something is successful, the bugs have been worked out behind the scenes.

But what created the recipe, the technology, the team, the company, the empire? The answer comes from another place entirely—another way of looking at the world. When something works, you can't tell much about its origins. You have no idea of the late nights that conceived of the principle or the long hours on the workbench where the prototype came to life.

In my view, there are three elements in play whenever something new is created or a new direction is embarked upon. These three elements play out in all areas of human affairs. Individually and together, they operate in a different dimension from the nuts and bolts of what they eventually create.

Leadership, strategy, and innovation are the holy trinity of what's new. When you're aware of one of these elements in your world, ask yourself: Where are the other two? Are they supporting each other? Or is at least one of them being neglected or ignored? This is why change in our world is often difficult, painful, even violent.

Leadership is needed because we're social animals who must co-operate to survive. We're tribal beings, and tribes need leaders to create a structure that allows us to work together and get along. Strategy is about decision-making, picking and choosing among the endless options of life. Leadership is needed here as well.

Moreover, strategy and innovation are close relatives—opposite ends of a single continuum. All great strategies have an innovative element, and all significant innovations exist within a strategic context. Most of the time what we see as a strategy or an innovation is a point that is shifting back and forth along this continuum.

Innovation is the wild card, the creator and destroyer of the world. Nature is profligate; not all her experiments need to succeed for evolution to occur. So it's in the human realm. But without fire, the wheel, electricity, the Internet, medicine, the government, and the corporation, where would we be?

The best leaders manage to put these three elements together. They are visionaries with a conscience. And in practical terms, they know how to push the levers that move people toward a goal.

Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, was once asked how he got his team to buy into his plan to create the real-time tracking of packages. He knew the technology would be there someday, and he wanted his company to be first out of the gate. Yet his management team didn't want to commit resources to what seemed like an impossible task. Smith's answer was that he got one of his engineers to buy into the quest, and eventually the others came onside. The follow-up question: What do you do when people just don't get it? Smith's answer was less elegant: "I body slam them."

The essence of leadership is the ability to make good decisions, which can only be determined in hindsight. The higher the leadership position the fewer the number of decisions, yet the more important the consequences. These decisions are mostly about strategy; Fred Smith and his tracking protocols, or Jeff Immelt of GE deciding to spend a lot of time in the developing world, where he figured most of the company's long-term growth would occur.

Leaders don't tend to be great innovators themselves. In fact, leadership has an inherently conservative quality. It's about expanding what is, more than betting the farm on something that might be. Again, it's strategy that saves the effective leader, deciding what to focus on and what to ignore.

These elements of leadership, strategy, and innovation combine to move the world forward. All three can be seen in the founding of the United States of America, arguably the seminal event in the creation of the modern world. The founders created a set of principles that attracted the huddled masses to a place where birthright was not the sole determinants of their prospects. Toss in a vast landscape to be exploited, and you have an empire that eclipsed its aristocratic parent.

Step back and you can see that the new state encouraged economic and even social experiments. Those with initiative flocked to its shores. Canada was a good idea too, and our founders selected from some of the best traditions of Britain, the United States, and France.

Historically, the hallmark of the American civilization has been the advancement of education and business—the great wealth generator. There has also been a sense of possibility, and a sense of fun. When leadership, strategy, and innovation are all in play, we're not just prisoners of destiny. We create our own futures, and it's not just work. Look at the most successful in any field. They seem to be having a pretty good time.

David Holt is a writer and consultant on strategy and communications. He can be reached at dholt@eastlink.ca.