Page 183 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

172 HBR Leader’s Handbook

As an example, many years ago one of us worked with Johnson &
Johnson’s business development leaders to assess their process for inte-
grating acquisitions, which was a key strategy for growth and innovation.
After interviews with managers from a number of companies that had
been brought into J&J (with varying degrees of success), several lessons
emerged, such as the need for a full-time integration manager to be part
of every acquisition, and for corporate functions to limit the number of
requirements they placed on new acquisitions. These lessons and others
were discussed with the CEO and his leadership team and then applied to
the next large acquisition. Based on the after-action experience of that
integration, the learnings were further adjusted so that J&J became in-
creasingly skillful at integrating acquisitions.

Building a future-focused culture

Setting up a process and structure for innovation in your unit or team is
one thing. But the process can never succeed if you don’t also build a cul-
ture to match. An innovative culture is one in which your employees are
(and you encourage them to be) intellectually curious, open to change, re-
silient, and flexible. It means that they actively learn new ways of working
(and learning from failure). It means they are future oriented, thinking for
the long term. And it means that they have an appreciation and capability
for innovation itself.
These qualities are imperative for innovation because they enable
managers and staff in the organization to embrace the future rather than
resist it. But there is an added benefit. What happens when you’re no lon-
ger leading that organization and can’t personally steer it into the future?
Building a culture centered around continuous innovation means that the
organization is set up to succeed long after you are gone. Leaders after you
will inherit an institutional capability and have a strong foundation upon
which they can build. Research by McKinsey’s Dom Barton and others
suggests that when leaders build this kind of long-term thinking into the
way the company does business, it creates significantly greater financial
return, market capitalization, and job creation over the long term—and