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Innovating for the Future 173

not by a little, but by a lot (see the HBR article by Barton and others, “The
Data: Where Long-Termism Pays Off”).
As we saw in chapter 3, shifting your organization’s culture is not easy
and depends on building the right leadership team, facilitating the right
team interactions throughout the organization, giving tough feedback, fos-
tering learning and development, and creating the right incentives. Let’s
examine what that looks like from an innovation perspective.

Developing a learning capability
The ability to learn rapidly is a critical capability for any organization com-
mitted to innovation. You can hire for this skill, but you also must develop
your existing talent and put in place structures and mechanisms to foster
the capability throughout.
As part of Thomson Reuter’s transformation, Smith and his human
resource team emphasized recruiting staff with technological, entrepre-
neurial, and problem-solving skills, and spent extra time coaching them to
be successful in the emerging transformation. But he and his senior ex-
ecutives also coached other rising leaders in the organization who showed
interest and ability to help reinvent the company, such as the innovation
champions and the corporate innovation team. Smith made sure that in-
dividuals who showed interest and skill in innovation were involved in
workshops, hackathons, and projects throughout the transformation pro-
cess and would deliberately seed them in different initiatives across the
organization. Leadership programs in the company also were aligned with
the emerging future direction. And as the transformation advanced, Smith
also made sure that human resources and performance management sys-
tems were updated and aligned with changes in the business. Smith’s
creation of the technology center in Toronto, which allows engineers and
developers who are working on common topics, like artificial intelligence,
to be co-located, was another way that Smith and his team strengthened
the learning capability.
Boeing gives us another example of what it takes to build a culture of
innovation. Before Jim McNerney retired as Boeing CEO in 2015, he real-
ized that the company’s continued success demanded that its people and