Page 161 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

150 HBR Leader’s Handbook

Also, innovation exploration is not just for customer-facing managers. If
you’re leading a corporate function—finance, legal, technology, human re-
sources, and so on—seek out opportunities to revolutionize processes or
restructure costs for your group. Whatever your leadership level or role,
try to learn something that may catch the eye of more senior managers and
perhaps become a showcase for next year’s broader corporate strategy.
There are four specific elements of this practice of actively champion-
ing future-focused innovation:

• Balancing the present and future: creating bandwidth to focus on
the future while still maintaining high performance in day-to-day
operations

• Getting ready for the future: developing the mindset, the funding,
and the market intelligence to invest wisely in future-oriented
areas of the business

• Shaping the future: driving the innovation, experimenting, and
learning to move your organization into new territory

• Building a future-focused culture: infusing your organization
with the skills, beliefs, and values to innovate well and to keep
innovating and reshaping itself over and over again

As with all of the practices in this book, we do not mean that the steps
we describe in these areas constitute a linear formula, but rather starting
points for your own journey toward creating a sustaining enterprise. To
give you a sense of what this means in practice, let’s look at the experience
of Jim Smith, CEO of Thomson Reuters, a leading provider of news, tech-
nology, intelligence, and expertise to finance, law, and other professional
industries.

Building sustaining success at Thomson Reuters

When Jim Smith was promoted to CEO of Thomson Reuters in January
2012, he took the reins of a $13 billon global news and information power-