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ics ation… By: Stephen M. Shapiro innovation egas Card Counters as a Weapon in Global competition To say the global economic environment is undergoing the most rapid change in the history of business is to state the obvious. Unless you have been living under a rock for the past year, you know all about the market blow following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the dot-bomb phenomenon and the collapse of Enron. To make matters worse, many American companies are increasingly facing resistance -- internal and external -- as they try to expand globally. These events, combined with an already declining global economy, have left corporate executives on edge. Yes, it’s bad news and it’s depressing. The good news? Everyone’s in the same boat. But now as before, the fundamentals stand: If you create a business that can adapt quickly and flexibly to the changing economic and cultural landscape, you may have the silver bullet you’re looking for. A key to achieving this kind of quick response is learning how to inject innovation into decisionmaking at all levels of the organization. It won’t happen by decree from the CEO, and I’m afraid there is no shortcut. Real innovation requires broad cultural change based on values, guidelines, and outcome-based measurement systems that give flexibility to all employees while mitigating risk for the business as a whole. Done properly, a company can stay ahead of the change curve and beat the competition while also easing its move into new markets. If you aim to achieve and sustain a leadership position in a global marketplace that never sleeps, your company must be a hothouse of creative thinking, flexibility and agility – twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Continuous innovation Innovation has traditionally been thought of as something separate and discrete, brought into the organization from outside, from the laboratory. Take your most innovative, creative people and lock them in a room while they develop a new process. Then tell them to implement the change companywide. But is this really the way a company should be run? A study carried out at Eckerd College in Florida challenges the traditional models. Managers who came to the Eckerd leadership course were broken up into teams and given a problem to solve, “The Hollow Square”. Before being allocated to their teams, the managers were assessed to determine whether they were “innovators” or “adapters”. In general, innovators tend to “do things differently” and are prepared to break with rules or ignore past traditions. Adapters, on the other hand, are focused on “doing things better”, but they tend to work within the rules and accept the status quo. For this exercise they were divided into teams, of which three are of particular interest. Each team was comprised of two groups. One of the groups was designated as “planners”, and its task was to work out a solution to the problem. The second group consisted of “implementers”, charged with making it work. The planners told this group what to do in order to form a hollow square with the tools that had been made available to them. In the first team, the group of planners was made up of the “innovators” and the implementers group was made up of “adapters”. In the second team, they were all mixed up together. The planning group had both innovators and adapters, and so did the group of implementers. In the third team, however, the groups were turned upside down. The planning group contained only “adapters” and the implementing group contained only 28 June 2012. The FiJi AccounTAnT www.fia.org.fj
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Page 1 and 2: JUNE 2012 www.fia.org.fj June, 2012
Page 3 and 4: June 2012 In ISSN 1728-9378 The ‘
Page 5 and 6: PUT YOUR PROPERTY IN GOOD HANDS We
Page 7 and 8: innovations ranging from technical
Page 9 and 10: Helping Small- and Medium-Sized Pra
Page 11 and 12: Creativity and Innovation in Educat
Page 13 and 14: Get more out of your business with
Page 15 and 16: First, we need to work towards deve
Page 17 and 18: THE UNCOMPLICATED TRUTH ABOUT BEING
Page 19 and 20: written in the positive. Long lists
Page 21 and 22: Letter to the Editor www.fia.org.fj
Page 23 and 24: they can act less on “gut feel”
Page 25 and 26: 24/7 Innovation: A Blueprint For Su
Page 27 and 28: www.fia.org.fj June, 2012. The FiJi
Page 29: a reflection of the lack of confide
Page 33 and 34: one who has been struck by the appr
Page 35 and 36: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Page 37 and 38: Why statistics Kill Innovation… A
Page 39 and 40: Membership Of Committees 2011/2012
Page 41 and 42: Fiji institute oF AccountAnts Young
Page 43 and 44: Accounting for Forests in Fiji: “
Page 45 and 46: “So to plant 500 acres of teak tr
Page 47 and 48: Top up with 290 Now with BSP’s SM

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