Kill the Company to Save the Company, with Lisa Bodell

You can’t innovate and be competitive without change. But companies tend to shy away from change or have systems in place that serve as anchors, holding them back.

Lisa Bodell, a globally recognized futurist, expert on innovation, and the author of Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution, helps executives embrace change–starting with changing the habits standing in their way.

While working with a group of executives, she discovered their helplessness to effect change. So Bodell tried a radical exercise: she gave the executives the assignment of working in a group to figure out how to bring down their company by thinking like a competitor. The counterintuitive brainstorm led to discovering practices that they no longer needed.

As Bodell explains:

And what was really interesting about it was they came up with ideas to kill their [own] company.  And then after 30 minutes they turned those ideas back onto their own competitors.  So they were killing meetings, they were killing rules.  It was really a cathartic exercise.  It was a really different way to approach strategic planning, because how most of us approach strategic planning is how to come up with more things for the next year and rarely do we start with getting rid of the things that don’t work first.

For more on Bodell’s advice on why you must “kill the company” if you want to grow and get ahead, watch this clip from Big Think’s interview: