Page 169 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

158 HBR Leader’s Handbook

Another way to measure your innovation projects is by focus area. For
example, Thomson Reuters categorizes its innovation projects in terms of
whether they will affect operations, customer experience, or product offer-
ings. In each of these buckets, it also looks at how close or far the projects
are from the current core, which is another way of assessing the time frame
and potential return on the innovation. The company’s Senior Vice Presi-
dent of innovation Katherine Manuel then maps out the existing innova-
tion projects and reviews them periodically with the corporate leadership
team so that they can decide how to balance their investments and expec-
tations. As she notes, “It’s important to have a portfolio of experiments
being run that impact all types of innovation and all areas of the company.”
At TIAA, the leading provider of financial services for the academic,
research, medical, cultural, and government fields, CEO Roger W. Fergu-
son Jr. considered the parts of the business that needed to be sustained,
both of which needed to evolve when building his portfolio. He would fre-
quently cite, for example, the importance of preserving the integrity of
the company mission: “We were founded to ensure that teachers could re-
tire with dignity. Providing a secure retirement remains our purpose, but
we now serve millions of others working to serve society in the nonprofit
sector, and we strive to deliver financial well-being throughout all stages
of life.” At the same time, Ferguson also emphasized that the new TIAA
had to be simpler to continue meeting its customers’ needs, so it had to
let go of old ways of thinking. Part of that was a decision to rebrand the
company to the shorter identifier “TIAA,” moving away from its old name
(the company had been TIAA-CREF: think of Govindarajan and Trimble’s
first box—preserve and improve). In line with its drive to simplify, TIAA
took a fresh look at its existing processes; in one case, it was able to cut a
fifteen-day process down to two-and-a-half days. The value to customers
was clear: the change reduced the number of customer phone calls by hun-
dreds of thousands (thus, Govindarajan’s box two—letting go of things now
getting in the way of the future). In step with the new identity, Ferguson
also accelerated growth across the company’s nonretirement businesses.
To do that, Ferguson commissioned a number of strategic growth teams to
problem-solve new opportunities and develop new offerings, most recently