Struggling to innovate? Read this… | Issue #241
Why you need to get deliberate about innovation as your company grows
Is bureaucracy starting to creep into your business? You’re most likely to notice this somewhere between 100 and 1000 staff. Up to 100, you had a flatter structure. And if someone needed to sort out an issue or iron out a problem, they could catch you in the pub on a Friday night. But now, with additional management layers put in as your business scales, it seems you’re building up some bureaucratic debt.
The same thing applies to innovation. When companies are smaller, sharing ideas and customer feedback is easier. You can work together on new projects and product launches, pooling your expertise.
But as your company grows, you need to get more deliberate about making this happen. The business often becomes siloed, and data or specifications aren’t shared. How often have I seen development teams writing code disconnected from the business? They don’t even know if customers will value their new initiative!
If this sounds familiar, be warned. If you don’t get deliberate about innovation, you’ll be trapped by your bureaucracy.

E246 | From Navy to Industry 4.0: Marty Groover’s Journey to Innovation
Are you struggling to achieve successful digital transformation despite continuous training and collaboration? Find out how to unlock agile decision-making with the military-inspired command by negation technique and improve employee engagement with immersive training programs – all while boosting manufacturing efficiency through SAP systems.
Marty Groover offers a unique perspective on the future of manufacturing. Drawing from his experience as a retired Navy officer and working in the manufacturing sector at Caterpillar, he has developed a deep understanding of the importance of technology integration and employee training. Now a partner and CTO at C5MI, Marty is dedicated to helping companies adopt Industry 4.0 technologies, creating smarter systems and more efficient processes. If you are a manufacturing leader, you will undoubtedly benefit from his insights, experience, and passion for innovation.
In this episode, Marty explains how you can boost manufacturing efficiency by harnessing the power of SAP systems, and how to drive digital transformation in your workplace. Marty is an advocate for creating a culture of learning, so he discusses how you can cultivate effective leadership and change management in your manufacturing operations, and unleash agile decision-making with the military-inspired command by negation technique.
Download and listen to learn more.
Recommended Podcasts

Purpose drives action with Dominic Monkhouse | The Do Zone
After leaving a trail of growth and winning several awards for creating great places to work, Dominic found his true calling; coaching other business leaders to help them have as much impact on their teams and organisations as he did.
Recommended Articles

How To Nail The Interview And Onboarding Process For New Employees
My latest article about building an amazing hiring an onboarding process has been featured in the Global Leaders Today magazine. Every great or aspiring-to-be-great business needs one. But for a company to build an effective talent pipeline, it must have a strategic mindset towards recruitment.

5 Strategies to Empower Employees to Make Decisions
Giving employees autonomy is critical for innovation, performance, and motivation. But while giving your employees more decision-making authority might look straightforward, in practice, it’s hard to pull off. David Lancefield offers five strategies that can help you reduce this decision deficit.

How to Apologize to a Customer When Something Goes Wrong
Businesses are bound to make mistakes and disappoint their customers. But how you build your apology message and your careful attention to executing it appropriately can make the difference between losing those customers or increasing their loyalty. When delivered well, your apology message can improve the customer relationship to the point where it is stronger than if the mistake had never happened — a phenomenon known as the service recovery paradox.

Redesign Your Mind by Eric Maisel
Your mind is like a room that is yours to redesign—a space that you can declutter, air out, furnish, decorate, and turn into a truly congenial place. Today, cognitive-behavioral therapy and CBT techniques are the tools that help us do this. In this book, Dr. Eric Maisel, Ph.D. moves cognitive change a giant step forward by describing the room that is your mind and how human consciousness is experienced there. Packed with visualization exercises, this accessible guide makes redesigning your mind and changing what—and how—you think easy and simple, an upgrade to the CBT method that lets you promote cognitive growth, healing, and change.
Quote of the week
“There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.”
Brené Brown
Mind Your F**king Business
Sometimes, bad news is good news…
This is how I start off ‘Chapter 2: Building A Customer-centric Culture’. To read the full chapter and more…
Get Your Copy of Mind Your F**king Business Today!

Dominic Monkhouse
Dominic offers business coaching and management development, strategy planning and organisational change, using tried and tested methods to launch your organisation onto an unparalleled growth trajectory. His programme is a function of his broad experience, his deep expertise and a proven process used by over 2,700 firms worldwide.